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A Christmas Story
Set-up: In the recent holiday classic, A Christmas Story, it seems all adults conspire against young Ralphie’s one desire. All he wants is a Red Ryder B-B gun. The boy’s father is irritated whenever he brings up the subject. That irritation spills over into all of Ralphie’s relationships.
After one particularly trying day at school, Ralphie runs into the school bully while walking home. Tired of being teased, Ralphie surrenders to his rage. He pummels the bully and bursts into a string of obscenities. Ralphie’s mother hears his tirade and sends him up to his room. Waiting tearfully for his dad to come home, Ralphie anticipates the worst punishment.
Scene (show or tell): Ralphie’s mother finds his younger brother, Randy, hiding under the kitchen sink. “Randy, what’s the matter? What are you crying for?” she asks.
“Daddy’s gonna kill Ralphie!” he sobs. Mom assures Randy that everything is going to work out, but she too seems to be fretting about what may come.
Still locked in his room, Ralphie fears the worst: I heard the car pull up the driveway, and a wave of terror broke over me. He’ll know what I said—the awful things I said!
Hearing his dad’s voice, Ralphie walks downstairs to meet his fate. After some small talk, Dad asks, “What happened today?” Ralphie realizes it’s all about to come out. He looks at his mother with a pained expression.
Surprisingly, his mother responds, “Nothing much. Ralphie had a fight.”
Tension rises as Dad puts down the paper and looks at Ralphie with a stern gaze. “A fight? What kind of fight?”
Mom replies, “Oh, you know how boys are. I gave him a talking to. Oh, I see the Bears are playing the Packers Sunday.”
A smile breaks across Ralphie’s face, and he beams at his mother. Ralphie says to himself, I slowly realized that I was not about to be destroyed. From then on, things were different between me and my mother.
Conclusion: Ralphie has just experienced a modern-day Passover. The doom of which he was so certain passed over him as his mother poured out mercy.
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Beauty of Unity
The late columnist Mike Royko writes about a conversation he had with Slats Grobnik, a man who sold Christmas trees:
Slats remembered one couple on the hunt for a Christmas tree. The guy was skinny with a big Adam’s apple and small chin, and she was kind of pretty. But both wore clothes from the bottom of the bin at the Salvation Army store.
After finding only trees that were too expensive, they found a Scotch pine that was okay on one side, but pretty bare on the other. Then they picked up another tree that was not much better—full on one side, scraggly on the other. She whispered something, and he asked if $3 would be okay. Slats figured both trees would not be sold, so he agreed.
A few days later Slats was walking down the street and saw a beautiful tree in the couple’s apartment. It was thick and well rounded.
He knocked on their door and they told him how they worked the two trees close together where the branches were thin. Then they tied the trunks together. The branches overlapped and formed a tree so thick you couldn’t see the wire. Slats described it as “a tiny forest of its own.”
“So that’s the secret,” Slats asserts. “You take two trees that aren’t perfect, that have flaws, that might even be homely, that maybe nobody else would want. If you put them together just right, you can come up with something really beautiful.”
Mike Royko, One More Time (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999); submitted by Dallas Roark, Emporia, KansasProverbs 27:17; Ecclesiastes 4:9-11; 1 Corinthians 12Marriage, Spiritual gifts, Teamwork, Unity
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information onLeadership Journal.
