The Rich Family in Our Church
(by Eddie Ogan)
I'll never forget Easter 1946. I was 14, my little sister Ocy 12, and my older sister Darlene 16. We lived at home with our mother, and the four of us knew what it was to do without many things. My dad had died 5 years before, leaving Mom with seven school kids to raise and no money. By 1946 my older sisters were married, and my brothers had left home.
A month before Easter, the
pastor of our church announced that a special Easter offering would be taken to
help a poor family. He asked everyone to save and give sacrificially. When we
got home, we talked about what we could do. We decided to buy 50 pounds of
potatoes and live on them for a month. This would allow us to save $20 of our
grocery money for the offering. Then we thought that if we kept our electric
lights turned out as much as possible and didn't listen to the radio, we'd save
money on that month's electric bill. Darlene got as many house and yard
cleaning jobs as possible, and both of us baby sat for everyone we could. For
15 cents, we could buy enough cotton loops to make three pot holders to sell
for $1. We make $20 on pot holders. That month was one of the best of our
lives. Every day we counted the money to see how much we had saved. At night
we'd sit in the dark and talk about how the poor family was going to enjoy
having the money the church would give them. We had about 80 people in church,
so we figured that whatever amount of money we had to give, the offering would
surely be 20 times that much. After all, every Sunday the Pastor had reminded
everyone to save for the sacrificial offering.
The day before Easter, Ocy
and I walked to the grocery store and got the manager to give us three crisp
$20 bills and one $10 bill for all our change. We ran all the way home to show
Mom and Darlene. We had never had so much money before. That night we were so
excited we could hardly sleep. We didn't care that we wouldn't have new clothes
for Easter; we had $70 for the sacrificial offering. We could hardly wait to
get to church!
On Sunday morning, rain
was pouring. We didn't own an umbrella, and the church was over a mile from our
home, but it didn't seem to matter how wet we got. Darlene had cardboard in her
shoes to fill the holes. The cardboard came apart, and her feet got wet. But we
sat in church proudly. I heard some teenagers talking about the Smith girls
having on their old dresses. I looked at them in their new clothes, and I felt
so rich.
When the sacrificial offering
was taken, we were sitting on the second row from the front. Mom put in the $10
bill, and each of us girls put in a $20. As we walked home after church, we
sang all the way. At lunch Mom had a surprise for us. She had bought a dozen
eggs, and we had boiled Easter eggs with our fried potatoes!
Late that afternoon the
minister drove up in his car. Mom went to the door, talked with him for a
moment, and then came back with an envelope in her hand. We asked what it was,
but she didn't say a word. She opened the envelope and out fell a bunch of
money. There were three crisp $20 bills, one $10 and seventeen $1 bills. Mom
put the money back in the envelope. We didn't talk, just sat and stared at the
floor. We had gone from feeling like millionaires to feeling so very poor. We
kids had had such a happy life that we felt sorry for anyone who didn't have
our mom and dad for parents and a house full of brothers and sisters and other
kids visiting constantly. We thought it was fun to share silverware and see
whether we got the fork or the spoon that night. We had two knives which we
passed around to whoever needed them.
I knew we didn't have a
lot of things that other people had, but I'd never thought we were poor. That
Easter Day I found out we were. The minister had brought us the money for the
poor family, so we must be poor.
I didn't like being poor.
I looked at my dress and worn-out shoes and felt so ashamed that I didn't want
to go back to church. Everyone there probably already knew we were poor! I
thought about school. I was in the ninth grade and at the top of my class of
over 100 students. I wondered if the kids at school knew we were poor. I
decided I could quit school since I had finished the eighth grade. That was all
the law required at that time. We sat in silence for a long time. Then it got
dark, and we went to bed. All that week, we girls went to school and came home,
and no one talked much. Finally on Saturday, Mom asked us what we wanted to do
with the money. What did poor people do with money? We didn't know.
We'd never known we were poor.
We didn't want to go to
church on Sunday, but Mom said we had to. Although it was a sunny day, we
didn't talk on the way. Mom started to sing, but no one joined in and she only
sang one verse. At church we had a missionary speaker. He talked about how
churches in
The minister said,
"Can't we all sacrifice to help these poor people?" We looked at each
other and smiled for the first time in a week. Mom reached into her purse and
pulled out the envelope. She passed it to Darlene. Darlene gave it to me, and I
handed it to Ocy. Ocy put it in the offering.
When the offering was
counted, the minister announced that it was a little over $100. The missionary
was excited. He hadn't expected such large offering from our small church. He
said, "You must have some rich people in this church."
Suddenly it struck us! We
had given $87 of that "little over $100." We were the rich family in
the church! Hadn't the missionary said so? From that day on I've never been
poor again.