|
How Closure Took One Client by Suprise
Felicity’s* eyelids felt like lead weights, threatening to shut themselves against her will.
“They’re mine—you can’t take them!” she wanted to scream.
But her tongue was thick, her forehead was scalding, and she knew that if the government wanted to take her grandchildren away, there wasn’t much she could do to stop them.
Her house was a train wreck—not even she could deny that. But because she had been sick for so long, meeting her grandchildren’s immediate needs had been about all she could handle. She had had no energy left for cleaning and no money to hire help. As a result, the state of her household had deteriorated so badly that one of her neighbors had called the police.
Desperate for a solution, Felicity turned to her church, where fifteen kind-hearted parishioners volunteered to come out and clean her place up. At first she was elated, but when she saw the results of their labors, yet another panic spiral ensued.
“So much was gone!” Felicity recalls. “As they were cleaning, they didn’t realize that some of the things they thought were junk were actually precious family heirlooms. In particular, I cherished a tiny green glass basket that my mother had owned as a girl and then passed on to me. When I discovered that basket was missing, I just about broke down.”
Trying to be helpful, Felicity’s friends had donated her excess possessions to the Samaritan Center. Not wanting to appear ungrateful, Felicity didn’t even try to retrieve them.
Eventually, however, Felicity found herself led to the Center in spite of herself. Supporting her two granddaughters had proven to be a greater financial burden than she could bear, and she knew that without some help her finances would soon bottom out.
“The Center provided me with just what I needed to get by: food, clothing, and even a little plate and cup that I could give to my granddaughter for her birthday,” Felicity remembers. “I was grateful for everything the Center was able to do for me, but at the time I had no idea what a double-blessing that tiny, tissue-papered gift would be.”
It wasn’t until she went to rewrap the present for her granddaughter that she discovered that the crumpled, cream-colored tissue paper held not one gift but two.
“The second gift was my mother’s little glass basket!” Felicity exclaims. “I had thought it was gone forever, but the Lord knew. He had planned to give this treasure back to me all along. Now I know that he just stored it in the Samaritan Center for safe-keeping.”
*For confidentiality's sake, this individual's name has been changed.
More client stories
|
