The Gift that Saved My Life

We’re thinking about gifts this month so I have to tell this story. I’ve never written it before. Yes, it’s a bit of a miracle story. But there’s an even greater miracle at the end.

Backstory first: my two youngest sons were born to me and my husband in my mid-forties (surprise!), in the middle of a too-busy life with full-time teaching and four other young children. Those days and years were all about surrender. I knew how much I was giving up; I had no idea then how much would be given back. Come with me to that first year (that I wasn’t sure I would survive).

  It’s 2002, almost summer now. I don’t know how I’m going to manage with six kids, and the cooking, the fishing, the crazy nearly ‘round-the-clock schedule of a fish camp—with another baby. The Littles are 6 months and 2 ½; the Biggers are 5 to 14. We’re just about to leave for Harvester Island. I’ve made this migration out to our fish camp island for 25 seasons. It’s always a mad scramble. I am trying to gather food, books, toys, diapers, all the accouterments needed for 8 of us on a wilderness island for 3 months with no access to stores.

I have most of what I need but I am missing one thing. One small thing that I would almost trade everything else for: a hard frame baby backpack. I had a blue kelty backpack for all the others. It fit me exactly, me with my long legs and short waist. But after our 4th child we were finished with babies, so I gave it to the Salvation Army.  

 Now, in the summer, I needed it most of all. I carry the baby while I’m cooking, cleaning, carrying laundry. And more, I needed it for hiking. At Harvester Island, we have two hiking trails. They’re short, but they’re an essential part of my sanity, living on a rainy roadless island where I am entirely immobile, where there is nowhere else to go. But now, with two new little ones, I don’t have a backpack. They cost too much to buy new. I’ve been stopping at the Salvation Army in Kodiak every week, checking, hoping, but now it’s too late. We’re flying out in 2 days.

The prospect of a summer on the island without cooking or hiking with my kids tightens my chest. And I am so harried with preparations I do not pray about this, unless tiny little wishmaking thoughts count. I don’t want to treat God like a vending machine Santa Claus, who exists to fill my every whim. And I know terrible things are happening in the world. How can this matter to anyone but me?

 This day, two days before my gang and I scramble into the bush plane, I am driving back from the grocery store. Out of habit, I turn the wheel toward Salvation Army once last time. Maybe I can at least snag a baby sweatshirt or an extra pair of shoes for Abraham.

I open the creaking door. A woman behind the counter glances up “Hi! How are you?”

My eyes are already casting over the racks of tired clothes, the shelves of books, the kitchen bric-a-brac lining the walls.

            “Good. I’m looking for some baby clothes. And well, I’ve been looking for a baby backpack too.”

            “Oh! We just got one in an hour ago. It’s in the back with the baby stuff.”

           

I catch my breath. Stay calm. In 8 steps I am picking up a blue kelty backpack, the exact model I gave away a few years ago. This one’s nearly new. It’s $5.

 

My hands shake as I pull out the money and hand it to her. I nearly run out to the car, then the tears come. 

I am not dying of a sickness. I’m not persecuted, fighting a war, caring for an invalid parent or losing a child. I am just a worn out mother with 6 children who is about to go to a lonely wilderness island for three months. And my father heard me.

My own father had no interest in my children or in me, but somehow a father who is spinning 13 trillion galaxies in the infinitude of space, who knows the hearts of 8 billion others hears the unspoken longing of a mother and sends just the right backpack to the Salvation Army in Kodiak just before I turn one last time to the store. How can this God bend so low and come so near?

 

But he did. And he does. Again and again, every day.

 

The nearest and furthest he came was here, to this ragged heart many years ago. He saved my life. And he’s waiting to save yours too.

 

Dear Friends, would you share a time when God bent low and came near in your life?