What Are the Odds?

The church I currently serve as Intentional Interim Pastor has a Christmas tradition of collecting and filling shoe boxes for the Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child Shoe Box Project. Each family is asked to get a shoe box and fill it with items that children in third-world countries might like to have as Christmas gifts – pen and pad, small toys, scarves for cold winter climes, flashlights, coloring books and crayons, stuff like that. On Christmas Sunday, the altar of the sanctuary will be filled to overflowing with the shoe boxes which will then be transported to Charlotte for eventual distribution to needy children all over the world. Our shoe boxes will join literally millions of others from all over the country prepared and distributed each year through the auspices of Samaritan’s Purse. It’s a good thing, and our church really enjoys it. But I didn’t know how good until I heard Franklin Graham, Executive Director of Samaritan’s Purse, tell this story.

Some years ago, Franklin Graham and his team were in war-torn Bosnia delivering their Samaritan’s Purse shoe boxes to children who had suffered the ravages of war and ethnic cleansing. Almost all of these children had lost someone close to them in the genocide. A woman with Graham’s team was passing out shoe boxes to eager and delighted little children when one little boy approached her. She handed him a shoe box and said: “Merry Christmas; Christ loves you.” The little boy replied: “But I don’t want a shoe box for Christmas; I want parents” (his parents were killed in the ethnic cleansing leaving him orphaned). The woman stammered: “I’m sorry, son; I don’t have any parents to give you for Christmas, but I do have this nice shoe box.” He reluctantly took it and opened it. Inside there was candy, crayons, some toys, a writing tablet, and in the bottom, the photograph of the couple who had prepared and given the shoe box the boy received, a childless couple who had been praying that God would give them a child. They enclosed a picture of themselves and on the back, their address. The boy wrote them to thank them for the shoe box, and they responded. Back and forth the letters went, until finally they decided to travel to Bosnia to meet the little boy. A few months later they adopted him and became his new parents.

What are the odds?

There were literally thousands of shoe boxes stacked up in front of the woman distributing them to a hundred eager outstretched hands. What are the odds that she would pick the one shoe box prepared by a childless couple praying for a child, and give it to the one little boy whose only Christmas wish was for new parents?

What are the odds?

About as much as a virgin having a baby, or a dead man coming back to life again!