I’ll never forget Easter 1946. I was 14, my
little sister Ocy was 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 five
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. When 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 babysat for everyone we could. For 15 cents we
could buy enough cotton loops to make three pot holders to sell for $1. We made
$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 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 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 kids 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 like poor white trash. We kids 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 spoon or the fork that night. We had two knifes that
we passed around to whoever needed them.
I knew we didn’t have a lot of things 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 –I didn’t even 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 that we were poor. I decided that 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
out of sun dried bricks, but they needed money to buy roofs. He said $100 would
put a roof on a church.
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 it 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 a 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.
I’ve always remembered how rich I am
because I have Jesus.
By
Eddie Ogan
