The Gifts Alice Gave

Have you ever tried to remember the face of someone from your childhood and couldn’t? The years rob and erase the physical features from our mind’s eye of those who may have even been important to us. However, the memory of their love seems rooted firm, as fresh as the present moment.

I can no longer recall the face of my grandmother’s best friend who passed away long years ago. Her name was Alice and as I spent a good bit of my childhood with my grandmother, I thought of Alice as my special friend too.

Mostly, though, I remember her gifts to me. Perhaps, that sounds awfully shallow, but one had to know Alice first and the depths of her poverty to understand her gifts and the depths of her love.

My birthday falls soon after Christmas, so I would get Alice’s combined gift to me somewhere around Christmas each year. Most years it was her own Moravian Christmas cookies, a chewy gingerbread cookie, thin and spicy-sweet. The year she couldn’t afford to make them, she wrote out the recipe for me to make my own. I was thrilled she thought I was old enough to handle the complicated recipe myself. The tiny scrap of paper was a treasured gift and I learned I loved to bake.

Then, there was the year she loaned me an old copy of “Hans Brinker” and told me it had been her favorite story when she was my age. I learned the love of reading.

One year, she gathered seashells, washed and cleaned them, and put them in a tiny cardboard box for me. She told me the story behind each one and its name. I learned the love of nature.

Her last gift, and my favorite, was the year I was twelve. She gave me a small pad of paper and the kind of ballpoint pen one often gets free. Then she told me to write beautiful thoughts.

I’m trying to do that still, and trying to tell others no one has so little to give that they can’t still give a lonely child a world of love.

Across the miles, across the years, and through the barrier of death itself, I believe God will somehow let Alice know, I send my thanks.

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Of course, of all the gifts ever given, the greatest is the gift from God of His Son to us. Belief in Jesus and confession of our sins brings us life eternal.

Paul says it beautifully in 2 Corinthians 9:15 NIV, “Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!”