The Other Side

As Christmas carols played in the background, Claire stood frozen, staring at the colored lights blinking on the green, snow-flocked Christmas tree and realized the great irony of her situation. She had been here in this exact location, a few weeks ago, just a handful of steps away on “the other side”. She recalled the day she saw hopelessness in a young mother’s face when she didn’t have enough food for her small child to eat. She watched as the mother took the biscuit from her own plate, tore it into bite-size pieces and put it on her child’s plate. She observed from a distance the deep, heartfelt pain when a father was told he had to sleep separate from his wife and baby. He would sleep on the cold hard floor in the gym so that his wife and baby would have a threadbare blanket and a cot in the hallway. She had silently watched, with tears in her eyes and an ache in her heart, as a young boy licked the last tiny morsels of a biscuit from his plate and begged the volunteers for more. The workers refused his request because they had to follow the rules. “One biscuit per person.” All that had been when she was volunteering on the serving line. Yet now she stood among them not to serve but to be served. She had cooked, encouraged, and loved them with no real understanding of how they felt with no place to call home, never imagining that she would find herself in a position to receive rather than give. Suddenly, it hit her, she was walking in their shoes and the stark reality of what they endured had just begun to reach to the tip of her very soul. She looked around again through different eyes. She felt her heart breaking as she watched a young child cry from hunger. A lone tear ran down her cheek as she saw an old man carrying around a plastic bag full of all his belongings. How could someone fit everything he owned into one small, brown, plastic grocery bag? Then she glanced down at her own suitcase and realized all that was precious to her was in this one small case.

She thought back about what events had led her to this place and moment in time. As she waited to be served the carefully measured portion of oatmeal, a biscuit and a small piece of fruit, a familiar meal she knew all too well from serving it every Thursday for the last few months, she thought back about the last year and how much her life had changed. She had grown up moving from foster home to foster home. Her most recent set of foster parents were okay but they never really sacrificed for her the way the parents at the soup kitchen did for their kids. She had never really seen that type of sacrifice until she started volunteering here. She had left foster care at age 18 with her boyfriend. She swore that she would never go back. It’s not that her foster parents were mean to her. It’s just that they didn’t care. It’s as if she didn’t exist to them. She was invisible. Her foster parents sat back each month and collected the check simply because they took her in. She couldn’t remember one sacrifice they made for her. Her boyfriend, Jack, was the only one who really cared for her. When they moved to Texas, he worked like a dog as a mechanic so that they could afford a small trailer and food to eat. She stayed home and cleaned and cooked. It was the happiest she had ever been. Each month he gave her a small portion of his check to get groceries and household items. They were really happy together. It’s a shame it all had to end that dark cold night.

In her mind's eye, she could envision herself walking back from the grocery store when she first saw the smoke. As she grew closer, she dropped her bags and began to run. She knew it was their trailer. As the trailer came into her vision, she saw Jack running back inside the flames. She began to scream, “Jack, Jack, don’t go, don’t go.” He didn’t hear her. By the time she reached the front yard, her neighbors were standing there. One of them held her back to keep her from going inside. She fell to the ground screaming his name. One of the firefighters said he had gone back into the trailer to look for his girlfriend. He had sacrificed himself for her. There had not been a single person in her life that loved her that much.

Quickly, she was brought back to the moment by someone speaking to her. “Don’t you love “The Twelve Days of Christmas?” the lady asked. She just shook her head and stared at the woman. The woman sang a portion of the song, “my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree.” The woman looked at her again and said “Do you know what that part symbolizes?” She looked at the woman and shook her head no. “Our true love represents Jesus and a partridge is one bird that will sacrifice its own life for that of its children. It’s amazing to think that Jesus did that for his children. He sacrificed himself for us.”

Tears began to rapidly roll down her cheeks as she gently placed her hand on her still flat belly. As she digested what the woman said about Jesus and what Jack had done for her and the baby, she realized that she would always sacrifice for the precious life inside of her. She promised herself to share the meaning of that Christmas carol with one person every holiday season. She didn’t need to have it all figured out today because she knew deep down, to the core of her very being, who had sacrificed everything for her.