A Little Christmas Story

I wanted to record some of our experiences from the past month because it was special to us this year!  (I got permission from Dillon to share this ;) Finances have been up and down this year, and we were not sure if we were going to be paid on a certain job from this summer—quite a large amount that would amount to over a month’s worth of wages.  Dillon started another job with his brother after that job was finished, and things continued to be really tight.  We went to Hawaii feeling like if we had known how things would be, we of course wouldn’t have been able to go, but I had saved 3 months of blogging money, and any birthday money received.  So with that, and help from a member of my dear family (you know who you are—THANK YOU again!) and of course my mom and Karl’s generosity while in Hawaii, it was possible to go and pay for everything that we needed to.  Luckily things like the car rental we paid for earlier in the year, and my Dad’s Christmas money to us paid off the little bit we had to charge.  It has been stressful and I have prayed and prayed and prayed that things would work out—for us and for Dillon’s brother’s family, as the job Dillon and him had started was also not going all that great as far as payments went.  We knew we needed a lot of faith for the majority of these past few months—sure there were melt-downs and what in the world are we going to do, but being in construction has really helped us know that no matter how bad things might look, we have always been taken care of and blessed, as long as we are praying and paying our tithing.  It’s as simple as that.  It was the waiting that was hard (thank you Janina for listening to one of those melt-downs and being there for me!  I have great sisters whom I love dearly and are such great listeners!).  Right before leaving for Hawaii, one of my blogging friends told me about how she is going through a really hard time with her husband.  She has always shown me kindness in sending me her patterns she sells for free and just being a good friend, though we have never met in person.  She’s struggling financially and I really felt like I needed to send her some money.  I had just put a birthday check in the bank and so I sent her some money, trusting that we would be taken care of and remembering all the great stories about giving and receiving.  It wasn’t a large amount, but hopefully something that would make a difference.  The next night, I took out the garbage and saw a present on our doorstep.  It was heavy.  It had a note attached that simply said, “Enjoy!”  I opened it up to see a glass jar full of change.  When I took it to the store to cash, in the middle of the jar was some rolled up money.  On the outside were a couple $1.00 bills, but inside were rolled some $20.00 bills.  The total we received from that jar was over $170.00!  I couldn’t believe it.  I wanted to shout it out and let everyone know how good people are!  We are so blessed.  Our next family night was all about prayer and Heavenly Father taking care of us, and I read the story about a man during the depression who had hardly anything for his family, receives a goose, only to be prompted to give it away.  He listens and gives the goose to a widow, and heads home downtrodden.  But when he gets home, his wife is roasting a chicken and a stranger gave his little girl some money so there would be presents.  The moral of the story was that while he was giving something away, the Lord was providing for him still!  Our story is not that extreme of course.  We are blessed with so much!  We don’t worry where our next meal will come from.  We have a warm home.  And we did get paid on that job just last week, and although not as much as we hoped on this last one, we had enough to cover our bills, pay Dillon’s brother the remainder of what we owed them, and even catch up a little!   Sigh of relief and many thankful prayers being said!  :) I feel an overwhelming amount of love and happiness when I think of those who listened to the promptings of the Spirit on our behalf, and I want to do the same!  We’ve tried to help out a couple different families in the ward by leaving things on their doorsteps the last couple weeks and my kids have just loved it.  It has felt so good, to offer up the little bit we can when we feel like we should.  But it is the good examples of those around me that have encouraged us to do so.    P.S.  Another awesome thing this year was my mom and Karl asked us all to give them any money we would have spent on them for presents.  They didn’t want anything other than a family picture and they gave all the money they received in place of their presents, along with cash of their own, to a struggling family they know of.  They dropped it off and the mom was in tears.