Salvation Army To The Rescue (December 14, 2003)

'Tis the season to remember the poor.

Last Saturday my son Peter and I rang bells for the Salvation Army at the Fox Valley Mall as part of a volunteer program that his school conducts. I enjoyed explaining to other volunteers what the Salvation Army meant to my mother when she was a little girl.

Back about 1934 a couple Salvation Army "lassies" began to visit my mother's home. They would play their guitars and sing, and sometimes bring a magazine for my mother (10 years old at the time) to read to her younger siblings. In an article she wrote nearly 40 years later for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News, Mom related how the Salvation Army made their Christmas that year. An excerpt:

During the Christmas season, Mom took us on a seemingly endless
streetcar ride to the big auditorium where the Army gave a party for
underprivileged children. There was a great white horse on stage who
could answer questions with a nod that was obviously a "Yes" or a
shake of his great mane that definitely meant "No." That amazingly
clever animal could even stamp out answers to simple arithmetic
problems with his great hoofs.

A glistening tree towered over a huge pile of brightly wrapped gifts;
a smiling fat Santa handed me a game from the stack and gave my
sisters each a stuffed toy. We all carried a box of hard candy home,
even Mom.

Since Dad had not worked steadily for months and we were "on relief," we knew that Christmas dinner couldn't be anything special that year. But that was the same year two tall cadets carried a bushel basket full of food between them up our long stairway. And, oh joy! One carried a large brown wrapped package under his arm that held a turkey.

The best thing those Salvation Army officers did was make Mom and her sisters promise to attend Sunday School whenever they could. A few years later, she met the man who would become my father at Moody Church's Sunday School. But that is another story.

Mom never forgot her indebtedness to the Salvation Army. It was a rule in our family growing up that we could not pass by one of their red kettles without putting some money in. I've passed that tradition to my boys and mention it to others as I have opportunity. (My oldest brother has even passed along the tradition to students he teaches in high school. One reported back to him about a shopping spree where he was confronted with a dozen kettles, and dutifully chucked in a coin each time!)

In Galatians 2:10, where Paul reports that he and Barnabas had agreed to divide evangelistic labor with James, Peter and John, the original apostles endorsed the plan with one request: "All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do."

As you spend and shop and travel and eat during this holiday season, be eager to remember the poor. Some of those recipients of your mercy, like my mother, will remember your generosity for decades, and pass it along to their children and children's children, and they will glorify God in heaven.