Miracle Story #19 (Part 1 of 2)

"I have a very interesting story about how I even got to the Salvation Army.

I was really leery to put anything on Facebook about this story, or any story, simply because I don't know how people are going to perceive it.

Am I going to be perceived as you know, this crazy Bible thumper person? Or is it going to be perceived in exactly the way that I want it to be perceived?

So I was torn about it for a long time...about this particular story.

Even though things like this happen in my daily routine of working with the Salvation Army, this particular one just really stuck out at me because an entire community had rallied around to make this happen for these people that are in our community that are less fortunate and struggle.

I just want to show them that their commitment to listening to that conviction in their hearts, ”I’m going to go out and buy a $10 gift card,” or “I’m going to buy a couple of hams or maybe some loaves of bread…”

While that may have seemed small, everybody going together and acting on that conviction, was actually God working in this huge way.

And that happens in my line of work all the time.

So I really want to bring that home.

And to let them know that God is moving in our lives every day and speaks to us if we open our eyes to truth, number one.

And number two, when we decide to do what he has asked us to do.

The Jericho walls didn’t just…God didn’t just go, “I’m just going to make the walls fall down.” No, the people had to march around the city.

They had to do something.

Could God have done it without them?

Absolutely.

But it was a testament of their faith.

The same way it is when you are working to help people when they’re poor and needy and hungry and homeless.

We can’t just say, “We’ll pray about the fact that you’re hungry.”

Does that produce food?

No.

So people with the notion in their heart to do something…that to me is a huge visual of faith. It’s a visual.

It’s a real, ‘I’m here.’

And in return, I think God gives us the real, ‘I’m here’ right back.

It’s like when I got the change back that day, and I remembered that Scripture from Matthew…

Even when I know that I know that I know that God is going to come through, there’s this human side of me that’s like, “Oh my gosh! How am I going to get all of this done?”

And it’s His way, I think, of saying His words to me.

‘Why are you stressing out about this? If I feed the birds, why wouldn’t I feed you?’

And so I just think it’s one of those things people need to know.

People need to know that God is unbelievably active in our lives if we open our eyes to what is happening.

I actually grew up in Winfield, Kansas.

My mother remarried to the man who I consider as my dad, and his parents were assistant pastors for a while at the church that I grew up in. I was eight when they got married and so it was very important that we went to church.

I would go to church on Sunday morning and every Sunday night. And Wednesday night. I had to go to every church function, and later, I couldn’t date any boys that didn’t go to church. And then if I went on a date with somebody it had to be with church.

And it was very legalistic.

Girls had to wear dresses or culottes. Do you know what a culotte is?

It’s a skirt that has a seam through the middle like shorts, so you can run.

People our age should never know what a culotte is. It is just not okay. (laughs)

Even though I very much appreciate my background in terms of it teaching me an awful lot about the Bible, it also taught me an awful lot about rules and regulations and authority and obedience and all of these things.

So when I got older and could do my own thing, it turned me away from religion.

But it never turned me away from my faith.

I was always reading the Bible and practicing my faith all the time, but I was not interested in going to church to sit in a pew and smile like all the church ladies do. I just was not interested in that.

So as I went on with my life, I had really great friends that were really strong believers and we would do Bible studies.

And those are the things that really kind of kept me fed as time went on.

I went to college. Got out and got my degree. Stayed home with my babies for five years.

And then I finally went to work.

I opened an insurance agency and I was very very successful, until a personal tragedy in my life.

I got a divorce.

It was not a good time for me. In fact, it was a very dark time in my life.

And in all of that it snowballed into me losing everything.

And I mean I lost everything.

At one point my children and I…we were homeless. There were times that I wasn’t sure how I was going to feed them. But I kept believing that God had a plan for my life. I knew he had a plan, without any doubt.

But I’m not going to lie, I was very angry.

I thought I had done everything right.

I was a good girl.

I had done all the things I was supposed to do.

I went to school. I got good grades. I got married. I had babies.

And then this series of events started happening in my life that I had no control over.

And I kept thinking, ‘God, why are you doing this? Why are you allowing this to happen? Please show me why you’re allowing this to happen.’

After about three years of struggling, finding menial jobs here and menial jobs there…nobody wants to hire the boss, right? I had a college education. I ran a business for 7 ½ years.

I mean surely I am marketable, right?

So at first I was feeling like, 'This is going to be fine. I got this.'

But then years of hearing that you’re overqualified and, "I’m sorry but we are concerned that you could be manageable…"

And I was like, "I’m totally manageable. You tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it."

So things just did not fall into place.

And we struggled.

We struggled a lot.

And then one day I was sitting in the kitchen and I got this phone call from the Salvation Army.

"Hey Crystal, I was just reading through your resume and I’d really like to speak with you because your resume is very impressive."

And I’m thinking, 'Oh fantastic! Wonderful, that’s great!'

So I got off the phone with the hiring manager after we set an appointment for me to meet with him. And then I started frantically looking online going, 'The Salvation Army is even in Winfield?'

I had never applied for that job.

I found the job description eventually and as I was reading through it I fell on my knees in tears, because I knew at that moment, that after years and years of asking God, "Why? Why would you do this?"

I knew in that moment that that was why.

That this is what I was meant to do.

Crying.

It was so profound and I just knew that I was going to get the job.

Now I have always been extremely professional in everything I’ve done.

But when we sat down and the guy who interviewed me started asking questions and I started answering a few of them, I started bawling. And then he started crying, and he knew.

From that moment, we both knew that this was God.

It was completely God.

I fessed up to him that I didn’t even apply for the job, that I didn’t even know the job was there.

So I’ve only been with the Salvation Army now for about a year and four months.

My first Christmas was a whirlwind because I only had two months under my belt before the season started .

Now I don’t know if you know very much about the Salvation Army at Christmas time, but people come in and they sign up if they want assistance for Christmas, and we do Christmas gifts for their kids.

And that I knew of.

But as I was pulling up applications, these people were asking if we were going to be providing food for Christmas because they needed food.

So I was like…‘Well yes we are.’ (laughs)

So last year we made Christmas baskets with hams and turkeys and potatoes and stuffing. And so this year when we went into it we knew that this was going to happen.

And I was a little bit more prepared.

I had all of these churches and organizations rallying around to start donating things, and this year an organization had said that they were going to try to collect all of the hams for us.

They wanted to do that.

So I was like, "That is fantastic! Just keep me posted on where you are because if you need help getting donations for hams, I can help."

But then about six weeks before our first distribution was going to take place, they called me and said they didn’t think there was going to be any way they were going to be able to get all of the hams.

I felt a little bit like an auctioneer…

"Well can you do 100? Can you do 25? Can you do 15?" (laughs)

"We’re sorry, we just don’t feel like we can do it right now."

Like, at all.

And I was like, "Okay, I can accept that. If you decide that you want to do something, I could always use your support."

So then I was looking at the long end of 446 pieces of meat in six weeks.

That’s what I needed.

Now I had been planning on using the six weeks that I had left before the distribution to start letting people know that I needed things like potatoes and bread and stuffing and green beans.

It’s a specific food that I put in the Christmas baskets so the families can go home and make a real Christmas dinner for their family.

So naturally when I got that news, I was overwhelmed.

'Oh my goodness, I can’t have baskets at all without the meat.'

So I started contacting groups and organizations and churches and there was a lot of positive feedback.

"Okay I’ll do 30."

"We’ll do 75."

"We'll get 100."

And so it was nice because things started building and building.

But it takes a lot to get from 0 to 446.

In the meantime, we had about 25 to 30 families who had called us after sign-ups saying, "I didn’t get on the sign up, can you help me?"

In addition to the food, what we have is the Angel Tree program.

So the families that sign up for our help for Christmas, they put their children’s information on a form and then we ask others to adopt those children.

And those people go out and purchase a couple of gifts for the kids, whatever their heart desires, and bring them back. We put them in a bag and we give those presents to these families for their children.

And they take them home and they wrap them.

The purpose is to give them a sense of help without rubbing it in their face that somebody else had done it.

You know what I mean?

Even though there is a fantastic program for free meals during the week, church meals and all that stuff, you have to remember that it's one of those things where they have to go, as a person with very little to nothing, and essentially say, "I have nothing, so can you feed me?"

In a group-like setting.

I think it’s a little more difficult for people where it’s a little bit more of a pride situation.

And what you find out from people who are in need is that, especially the ones who really really need it...it is so hard for them to say, "I need help."

And so to go to a place where you’re getting free meals, unless you are just absolutely on the verge of starvation and you're homeless...you’re not going to see a lot of people participate in that because they have to say, ‘I don’t have food at my house.’

You know what I mean?

So with our Christmas distributions, the idea is to be able to provide that so they can participate in it. And we can do it in a secret way.

And people who want to give to it, can give to it in an anonymous way.

The people who are giving get more, in my opinion, than the people who are receiving.

It’s like we get this group of people that just start rallying around each other and the next thing you know, you’ve made new friends and you’re laughing about struggles, and you’re trying to figure out a way and it’s like…’Who’s got two more bags of potatoes?’

It becomes this community thing where there is this bond and you have this unity.

And you’re doing it all for God.

You’re not doing it for yourself.

And in some ways, you’re not even really doing it for the people that you’re giving it to because you don’t even know them.

You’re doing it because you’re obeying and you’re convicted to do something for somebody who needs you.

And that is just huge.

It just brings people together.

And I love that part of my job.

So back to the hams…

I had all these hams. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get it done. And it just kinda started slowly rolling to.

I have two separate distributions.

I’m over Cowley County. Ark City and Winfield are the two larger cities in the county and they are identical in terms of poverty level, from what I have personally seen.

And it’s like, if you do one thing in Ark City, you have to do it in Winfield too. And vice versa.

I am trying to unite the communities together because I’m one single person and there are no other employees working for the Salvation Army there.

So I am it. The whole county, all me.

And so everybody else rallied around me and were people that I had asked to come and help me.

By volunteering.

So it’s stressful for me to have to have one large distribution in Ark City and one large distribution in Winfield.

And just so you can kind of have a perspective, when we moved all of the food and the gifts from my Winfield administration office and down to Ark City where we had distribution at First Baptist Church, we had to have an enclosed truck, like the size of a U-Haul.

And we also had to have a van.

And a truck too.

We had to load all of that and then unload all of that.

And that was just one distribution.

It is so big that there are times that my mind can’t even wrap around what I am doing.

And then I look back on the pictures that I have taken, and the people that I have talked to, and I’m like...I don’t even know...

And people have said, "You’re so amazing."

And I’m like, "I am not. I am just the vessel. That's it."

Because I’m telling you, I am scatterbrained.

And most of the time I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.

I wake up in the morning going, ‘Okay God…’

So we got down to the night before our last distribution and I had a few helpers.

We had gone down to the church and we were trying to get everything arranged. And I was pretty sure that I was going to be short some stuffing, and so I was counting the boxes of stuffing.

I was getting down to the last two that I had and I knew that I needed 515 specifically for that distribution. I got to 512.

And I thought, 'Well I can make 512 work.'

But then one of my volunteers came back and said, "Here, you forgot these."

And it was three packages of stuffing.

And I know it sounds crazy but that’s the kind of thing I get excited about.

Stuffing.

And it was like God was saying, 'Again Crystal...I got this.'

It’s just a constant reminder that He gives to me.

And so right after that we were counting up the meats.

And I thought I had all the meat I needed. I thought I was good.

But we discovered that we were actually 60 short.

Sixty short.

How could we be sixty short?

That’s not even possible.

And so I recounted them.

We were definitely sixty short.

So my helper, Leanne, goes, "What are you going to do about that?"

We needed $600 worth of meat and it was 10 o’clock at night....the night before the final distribution at 9am the following morning...."

To be continued. (Part 1 of 2)

© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.

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My name is Crystal, and I live in Winfield, Kansas.

In the midst of serving the needy, I AM Miracle Story #19.