Statues in the Ashes
Recovering from a
painful divorce, Pat Dygart wondered if she’d be able to
celebrate the approaching holidays. She had stored Christmas
decorations and other memorabilia in the basement of her new
house, hesitant to unpack them because of the hurtful memories
they would invoke. However, she decided to set up her cherished
Nativity scene. The beautiful statues always put her in a
festive mood.
As she came home
from work one evening, Pat smelled something burning. “Probably
the hamburger I just cooked,” her teenage son Jamie reassured
her. Pat checked the stove. Jamie was always careful, and
everything seemed normal. Jamie left for work, and she lay down
for a quick nap.
Sometime later Pat awakened to a mist hanging in the air. No,
it was smoke, black clouds billowing up from the basement!
Frantically she dialed 911.
As the trucks approached, Pat ran in and out of the house in a
frenzy, grabbing anything she could. Her photographs, the
figurine collection…how could she save it all?
Suddenly a blanket of calm seemed to wrap itself around her.
Pat stopped her desperate scurrying and stretched out her
hands. “God,” she heard herself saying, “I don’t understand
this. But if there is a reason I should lose all this, I give
it all to you.” Quietly, she left the house. A moment later,
the basement windows blew out.
The Dygarts
moved in with her mother, and visitors streamed in and out to
comfort Pat. But although she tried to stay serene, her heart
was heavy. “I worked so hard to start a new life,” she wept
with a friend, ”and now everything is ruined.” How could she
survive yet another loss?
A few days after the fire when she went into the basement, her
remaining hope disintegrated. Horrified, she and Jamie stood in
wreckage far worse than she had imagined. Black soot on every
surface. Melted furniture, charred belongings, water and
ashes.. “Oh Jamie,” Pat wept again, “you know what I feel
saddest about? My Nativity scene. It’s lost forever down
here. And how can Christmas come without it?”
Pat worked all
week, digging through the debris, painfully bagging the ruined
pieces of her life for the garbage heap. By Sunday she was just
about finished, and as she and Jamie attended church, Pat
realized that they had forgotten the annual ornament swap.
Traditionally, whoever took a family’s ornament would pray for
that family all year. Pat noticed there were only a few names
left. “Let’s take one,” she whispered to Jamie. “We need to
pray for someone else.”
After church they went up to the tree and chose the nearest
bauble. “Mom, look!” Jamie stared at it. The ornament was a
replica of a crčche. And the stable had been made with burnt
matches.
What did it mean? Pat wondered as they walked back to her
mother’s house. Was God trying to tell her something? But when
she entered the house, she stopped short. On the table stood
the twelve figures in her Nativity scene. Clean. Unbroken.
Perfect. “I went to your basement and found them in the middle
of the debris,” Pat’s mother told them, as surprised as they.
“The box wasn’t even dirty.”
They were
her statues---Pat saw familiar marks on them. But they hadn’t
been anywhere in the basement. Pat had looked all week, again
and again.
Awestruck she touched the figure of the Christ Child. And
suddenly, she understood. From the moment she had stood in her
smoky house and surrendered her life to God, He had begun to
heal her, to bring her---like the figures---safely from the
ashes of an old life. A rocky road still lay ahead of her, but
she wouldn’t travel it alone. He had sent His Son to tell her
so.
(C) 1993 Joan Wester Anderson
Originally published in Womans Day Magazine
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