What could I pay for that would end someone's wait?
Yesterday we gave time. Today's currency is resources: money, or something you own or buy.
Play "Joy to the World" today, any version your family likes.
Isaac Watts, an English minister and hymn writer, wrote the words in 1719. He was rewriting the ancient Psalms of Israel as songs for his own congregation, and this one came from Psalm 98, a song that calls the whole earth to shout for joy because God is coming to set the world right. Watts didn't write it as a Christmas carol, but the song found its way to Christmas anyway. The tune most of us know was arranged in 1848 by an American music teacher, Lowell Mason.
The first verse is the one most of us know by heart: "Joy to the world, the Lord is come! / Let earth receive her King; / Let every heart prepare him room."
Listen for the second verse, too. It calls on the "fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains" to "repeat the sounding joy," as if joy were an echo that keeps going once it starts.
Then the third verse reaches back to the very beginning. In the garden story at the start of Genesis, the ground is cursed and begins to grow thorns, a picture of the world going wrong. Watts answers it: "No more let sins and sorrows grow, / Nor thorns infest the ground; / He comes to make His blessings flow / Far as the curse is found."
"Far as the curse is found" is a big promise. In this song, joy flows outward from one heart and one house until it reaches every place where something has gone wrong.
Money and things can flow that way too. Many of us know someone stuck in a wait that money could end: a bill that has been past due since fall, a car repair postponed for months, a pair of glasses a kid has needed since school started, a plane ticket home that keeps not happening. For someone in that spot, the wait is the hardest part, and a gift of resources can end it in an afternoon.
The week after Christmas is a good time for it. Some of us have gift cards, Christmas money, or extra we set aside for the season. Any of it can become the end of somebody else's wait.
Give it without your name if you can. Generosity week's lesson still holds: when the gift has no name on it, the thanks goes past you.
Today, spend something to end one person's wait.
Get out the plan from December 25, if your household made one, and choose the person.
Name the wait: a bill, a repair, a long-delayed need. If you aren't sure what it is, ask someone close to them.
End it, or pay for the end of it. Deliver it without your name if you can: a payment made directly, a gift card in a sealed envelope, or a gift passed along through someone you trust.
Kids' story: read "Tessie's Seeing Glasses" from The Overflow Adventure in Wanderful Woods together.
Time: 20 to 45 minutes, depending on the gift.
With kids: ask, "Is there something a friend has been waiting a long time for?" A child can add some Christmas money or help deliver the gift.
Good sense: if you don't know the person well, give through someone who does, or through a local group that helps with bills and repairs.
Give through an organization. If no one person comes to mind, these groups end long waits for kids:
charity: water (charitywater.org) funds clean water projects close to home, so kids who walk for water every day can spend those hours in school instead. Every project shows up online with photos and a map pin.
Smile Train (smiletrain.org) helps local doctors around the world give free cleft surgery and care to children.
Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption (davethomasfoundation.org) helps children who have waited longest in foster care find a forever family.
Hello, my wonderful story friends! Last time, the Leftover Parade went all the way to Percy’s house and stayed all day, and Percy gave back everything he’d taken, and three more of everything besides. Today, the friends remember something Tessie couldn’t see.
Have you ever helped somebody get something they’d waited a really long time for? Let’s go see what the friends make.
The morning was bright and still, and frost covered every twig in Wanderful Woods, so that the trees looked like they were made of white lace. When the sun touched them, they sparkled.
Ricky was sitting on a rock by the river, holding up one of his jars and looking at a little bug through the thick, round glass bottom.
“Whoa,” he said. “It’s GIANT.”
Mr. Monkey came over to look. Through the bottom of the jar, the little bug looked as big as a berry. Every tiny leg was easy to see.
Then Ricky turned the jar around and looked at Mr. Monkey through it. Ricky’s eye, on the other side of the glass, was enormous. It blinked.
“Hee hee hee!” went Mr. Monkey. “Ricky, you have a GIANT eye!”
Ricky walked around looking at everything through his jar. Everything was huge. He walked right into Bruno’s tummy, boing, and looked up through the jar, and Bruno’s nose was the size of a pinecone.
“Bruno,” said Ricky. “Your nose is ENORMOUS.”
“Haw haw haw! It’s a regular nose!” said Bruno.
Mr. Monkey was still giggling when he remembered something. Tessie, at the Overflow Feast, holding her circle close, and then far, and then close. Is this a turtle… or a rock? And Tessie, on the night the sky danced: It’s a little blurry these days.
Tessie couldn’t see things anymore. Not clearly. Not her circle. Not the sky. Not her friends’ faces.
“Mr. Moose,” he said. “Tessie can’t see the pictures. She can’t see anything clearly at all. And she can’t read the Story Stone anymore, either. She told me once. She hasn’t read it in years and years.”
The Story Stone was the big old rock by the Listening Log, with words carved into it, a long time ago, by somebody nobody remembered. Tessie used to read it every day. Now she just sat beside it.
Mr. Moose was thinking. He looked at Ricky’s jar. He looked at the bug. He looked at Bruno’s giant nose.
“Ricky’s jar makes little things look big,” he said slowly. “And blurry things look clear. What if Tessie had two jar bottoms? One for each eye?”
“Seeing glasses!” said Mr. Monkey.
But to make seeing glasses, they would need two jar bottoms, and something to hold them together, and something to hold them on. And Ricky only had one jar that was thick enough. It was his favorite. The best one in his whole collection.
Ricky held his favorite jar tight against his chest. He had found it in the river all by himself. It was the clearest, roundest, best jar he had ever found. He looked at it for a long time.
“You can have it,” he said finally, and he held it out. Then he looked at it again. “But it’s only one. And Tessie has two eyes.”
First they went to Tessie, to see if a jar would work at all. Tessie took Ricky’s jar in both front feet, and instead of looking through the bottom, she put her whole head inside it, like a fishbowl.
“Everything is very… big,” said Tessie, from inside the jar, “and very… round.”
“Hee hee hee! Tessie, it goes on your EYES, not your whole head!”
“Heh… heh… heh,” laughed Tessie, and her laugh went bwoh… bwoh… bwoh inside the glass.
Everybody brought something.
Daddy Monkey carefully took the bottom off Ricky’s jar, pop, because he was the best fixer in the woods. Bruno brought honey to stick things together. He held the honey pot while Mr. Monkey dipped the twigs in it.
But every time Mr. Monkey looked away, Bruno took one tiny lick. And then another tiny lick. When Mr. Monkey reached in for more, the pot was empty, and Bruno had honey all over his chin.
“Bruno,” said Mr. Monkey. “Where did the honey go?”
Bruno thought about it. “In me,” he said. “Haw haw haw! I’ll get more.”
And he did, a whole new pot. Benji brought two thin, bendy twigs from his clover patch. Shiloh pulled a long piece of soft wool from his own coat for the strings.
Percy came running up the hill with the thick, round bottom of an old bottle, the shiniest thing left in his whole pile. “For the other eye,” he said, all out of breath. It was one of his favorites too. Mr. Moose held everything steady, and Mr. Monkey tied the knots.
They made the first pair of seeing glasses, and they were too big. Tessie put them on, and they slid right down her nose, and down her chin, and onto the snow.
“Heh… heh… heh,” laughed Tessie.
They made the second pair, and they were too small. They pinched Tessie’s nose so tight that she sounded like a duck when she talked. “Thank you, dears,” she said, like a duck.
“Hee hee hee!” went Mr. Monkey. “Tessie’s a duck!”
They made the third pair. Mr. Monkey tied the wool string very carefully behind Tessie’s head. And Tessie opened her eyes.
She didn’t say anything for a long, long time.
She looked at Mr. Monkey. She looked at Mr. Moose. She looked at Benji and Shiloh and Ricky and Percy, one face at a time, slowly, the way you look at something you haven’t seen in a very long time.
“Oh,” said Tessie. “There you all are.” And then she looked up at Bruno.
“Bruno!” said Tessie. “When did you get so BIG?”
“Haw haw haw! I’ve been this big for a long time!”
Tessie looked at the red circle Benji had painted, up close. “It’s not a rock,” she said softly. “It’s me.”
Then, very slowly, Tessie turned toward the Story Stone. She walked over to it, one slow step at a time, and she put her face right up close to the old carved words. And for the first time in years and years, Tessie read them out loud.
It wasn’t a story. It was a song. And Tessie sang it, slow and crinkly and warm:
”Sing, little river, sing, tall tree,
Sing, every rock and hill with me.
The long wait’s over, the light is here.
Sing it again, so the whole woods hears.”
When she finished, it was quiet.
Then Mr. Monkey sang it back. Then Mr. Moose. Then everybody, all together. And the song went out across Sunny Square, and into the trees.
And the woods sang it back. The river went bubbling under its ice. The wind went whistling through the frosty pines. The birds started up in every tree. Down the hill, all of Percy’s shiny things jingled in the breeze. And across the river, the old crow and his son and the three grandchicks sang it too, though the grandchicks were still mostly mooing.
The song went farther and farther, from home to home, until the whole woods was singing it, all at once, every rock and hill and tree.
Tessie stood beside the Story Stone, with her seeing glasses on, and sang it one more time, very slowly.
“I waited… a long time… to read that again,” she said.
“What a day!” said Mr. Moose, on the way home. “Ricky looked at a bug through his jar, and he had a giant eye, and Bruno had a giant nose. Ricky gave his favorite jar, Percy gave his shiniest bottle, and everybody gave something, and we made Tessie seeing glasses. The first ones fell off, and the second ones made her sound like a duck.
Then she could see, and she read the Story Stone, and the whole woods sang.”
Mr. Monkey whistled, and Mr. Moose hummed, and together they sang:
We are better together,
Moose and Monkey forever.
And all through the frosty woods, long after the sun went down, a little bit of the old song kept going, in the river and the wind, as if the woods didn’t want it to stop.