What to buy for the person who has everything? Never mind the absurdity of the question. The fact is, we’ve all been there – trudging through store after store in search of that elusive something. Deep down, we know Christmas isn’t really about “things.” And yet, we’re determined to find that perfect gift. With hundreds of stores offering billions of wares, we can’t bear the thought of going home empty-handed. We must find something unique to wrap. After all, ‘tis the season.

Now, I love gifts as much as the next person. In fact, some of my fondest Christmas memories involve long-wished-for toys. Like the year I received the Baby Burps doll I so desperately wanted. For weeks, I squeezed her plastic tummy and giggled at the soft hiccuping sound she made. Or last year, when I received a food processor and tea towels. Wow, Mom, this is so great. Really, I like it. Even so, I can’t escape the idea that gift-giving should involve more than traipsing miles in winter boots, doling out crumpled bills. Or as someone said, “More than buying things that people don’t need.”

An obvious answer to the problem is, of course, the homemade Christmas – a kind of throw-back to the day of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I know lots of people who have tried this, and it’s not a bad idea, especially for kids.

What parent wouldn’t love a tin can pencil holder or hand-painted paperweight? It certainly stresses the point that meaningful gifts don’t have to cost big bucks.

But on the downside, it can mean frequent trips to the craft store. And as for relieving holiday stress, I’m not convinced making present is any less of a headache that buying them – even if they are “good things.”

Maybe the real problem is that we conceive of gifts as tangible – and wrappable. Interestingly enough, the dictionary defines a gift as simply, “a thing given.” It says nothing about cost, appropriateness or presentation – only the condition of the heart. One person giving to another. That’s all. So maybe we ought to stop talking about “getting the Christmas spirit,” and concentrate on merely giving it.

How? By pausing to ponder the real needs of people around us. Now it may be that the best gift you could give someone is, in fact, an object. Perhaps a winter coat, box of food or help paying the rent. But be open to seeing non-material needs as well. Needs for friendship, forgiveness, and appreciation, to name but a few. How sad that we so seldom think to give these things away as gifts. Instead, we hold them tightly, letting a sense of justice and fairness dictate who is worthy to receive. But how different the world would be if we simply gave – not sparingly, but lavishly: not reluctantly, but eagerly.

We give when we release a grudge, are patient with a fool or speak kindly to a stranger. We give when we make time to keep a promise, seek out a forgotten friend or enter into another’s sorrow. We give by baking cookies for a neighbour, offering to babysit for weary parents or spending time with a lonely person. We give when we look out for others, not ourselves.

I’ve often wished I had the guts to do this – to forget what anyone might say and just give people what they really need. That I could somehow overcome my desire to exchange wrapped presents instead bring true gifts. Joy. Peace. Laughter. Happiness.

I know. I know. You’re wondering how these things would look under the tree. To be honest, I’m not sure I have the answer.

All I can say is that Christmas joy isn’t found in a shopping bag and the yuletide spirit isn’t limited by the calendar. So give yourself away and see what happens. You may just get what you really want for Christmas.

Reprinted with permission from A Christmas Digest, © 1998.

Call it pride. Call it perfectionism. The fact is, I’ve always cared about doing things well. And when I can’t, I’m devastated.

In Grade 2, it was a vase. A masterpiece, I’m sure, had it not slipped from my hands and crashed to the linoleum floor. In an instant, only shards of pickle jar and gooey tissue paper remained, I could barely hold back the tears as the custodian swept up the mess and carried it away. It was my first certified failure.

Others followed, of course. Forgotten notes during a piano recital, missed words in a spelling bee and more than a few failed math tests punctuated my childhood. But all the while, I knew I was capable of more and was determined to strive (read: beat myself) ‘til I got there. After all, mine was a family of achievers.

Now maybe you’re wondering what the big deal is. I mean, trying to hard isn’t a sin. And yet, ultimately, that’s what it has become.

You see, deep down, I’m still the same anxious kid I always was. Though many years have passed, I still sweat the small things. I dread showing weakness or neediness. I compulsively pick off lint and refuse to play party games, lest I look like a fool.

It may sound silly, but what was once the admirable trait of conscientiousness, as mutilated into a crippling disease. One that doesn’t just affect my social life, but hinders me from truly knowing God.

Spirituality, after all, requires humility. You admit that you need God in your life and invite Him to work in you. The only catch is, you have to let Him do it. And that’s the hard part.

Funny, for all the time I’ve spend in church over the years, you’d think I’d have caught on before now. That I’d have realized that God uses broken things to reveal His greatness. That weakness can be strength; and foolishness, wisdom. But somehow I missed it.

Looking back, it seems so obvious. All those flannel-board stories from Sunday school weren’t about great people doing great things for God. They were about weak, ordinary people. Moses stuttered. David was the runt. And Noah, the neighborhood laughing stock. Yet, I never thought of them this way.

Only now am I realizing the truth of these Bible characters. In process, I’m realizing how contrary my perfectionism is to faith. Not trusting others, always wanting to make things happen my way and never leaping without looking – all the exact opposite of what God desires from me. He’s calling me to take risks, to step out. To give him some room to work.

And though I’ve fought Him on this point, I’ve finally given in and determined to let God be God. Because frankly, if trying hard were what it took to know God intimately, I would have been there years ago.

Undaunted, Eleanor persevered. She left her home, her country and 35 years of singing and choir directing to go and care for the poor in Haiti. No sooner had she arrived than she started a school. On a five-acre property outside Port-au-Prince, Eleanor took a sharp rock and drew an A in the dirt. Then she drew a B.

“We taught 20 children the alphabet that way,” she explains. “We had no blackboard, no chalk and no walls – only the shade of a tree.” Nevertheless, the school grew quickly. The 20 students became 50, then 100. Today, more than 600 children, too poor to attend classes anywhere else, receive schooling at Eleanor’s Mariani compound. But education wasn’t the children’s only need, nor was it their greatest.
“Some of the students were so poor, they would go for days without eating,” she says. “Others would find scraps of food in the city dump, often with bugs crawling on every bite. Many suffered from worms and fever. They were often too sick to concentrate and had no desire to learn.”

So Eleanor and her staff began feeding the children. Each morning, she would purchase and prepare food for the students. Eventually, she hired a cook to take over the task. There were just too many other things waiting to be done.

Grieved by the number of abandoned and orphaned babies in Port-au-Prince, Eleanor contacted Haiti’s Social Welfare Department. “Don’t give those children to the voodoo priests for sacrifices,” she begged. “Give them to me.” Before long, the officials took her up on the offer.

“They told me they had fourteen sick, abandoned babies at the hospital,” she recalls. “But when I went to get them, the nurse informed me that all fourteen had died during the night.” In shock, Eleanor questioned the nurse.

“How could this happen?” she asked.

“That’s easy,” the nurse replied. “They were laying on the concrete down there. It rained last night and the window was open.”

Appalled, Eleanor demanded to see the other babies. The nurse refused. They were invalids – children deemed too deformed and too sick to have any hope. Eleanor disagreed, insisting that she knew another physician. After much haggling, Eleanor left the hospital with ten infants.

Some of the infants had contagious skin diseases. One had no tailbone. Another lacked muscles around his eyes. Though none was expected to survive the night, all of them did. Over a period of two years, all but one was restored to full health – largely, says Eleanor, through prayer.

And so her work with orphans began.

For almost 30 years now, Eleanor has been caring for Haiti’s poor. The conditions are difficult at best: electricity comes on for an hour at a time – almost always after midnight; rats try to climb into the orphanage’s cribs; embargoes limit food supplies. Still, Eleanor refuses to give up.

“Half of the children in Haiti die by the time they are five years old,” she told an audience in Miami. “They die of starvation. They die of malnutrition. They die from exposure. The things you send me – the cardboard boxes of clothes and shoes – when those boxes get to Haiti, people beg for the cardboard. ‘Mom, please. You promised me the cardboard.’ So we cut the box in two and it becomes beds for their children.”

Criss-crossing North America several times a year, Eleanor does everything she can to make Haiti’s plight known. At the age of 81, she remains a tireless fundraiser. Drawing on her strong voice, she sings about Jesus and urges people to follow his compassionate example. During these concerts, she appeals not only for finances and supplies, but for adoptive parents as well. To date, more than 130 children from her orphanage have been placed with families in the United States and Canada.

While every adoption story is unique, some are absolutely incredible. One pair of six-week old twins – a boy and a girl – came to Eleanor’s orphanage covered in axle grease. Adopted by a family in New Jersey, the children received music lessons when they were five. The little boy turned out to be a child prodigy. Though abandoned in the slums of Port-au-Prince as an infant, he’ll soon attend the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York City.

But while some of the children in Eleanor’s care go on to live with caring families around the world, others will never leave the orphanage. Still, Eleanor and her staff are adamant that each child experience love – pure, genuine and unrestrained. Rising at 5 a.m. every morning, Eleanor prays for the children by name. In the afternoons, she visits the younger ones in the nursery, cradling them in the crook of her arm and asking God to bless them.

“She cares for every child like it is her own,” says friend Cathy Klassen, who adopted her son, Andy, from Eleanor’s orphanage. Her husband Larry agrees. “She becomes like a mother to everyone she meets,” he says. “People call her Mom for that reason.” Hardly anyone in Haiti knows her as Eleanor. She’s just Mom – provider of everything from hugs to shoes to wedding clothes. She has even been known to take money out of her pension fund to buy school supplies for the children.

Each July, her arms stretch wider still when 500 people from Haiti’s mountain villages descend on the compound for a week-long conference. “Mom will have spent weeks sorting clothes, getting the beds prepared and finding extra food to send back with them,” says Glenda Reimer, another adoptive parent. “Sometimes she negotiates for things at the depot because she doesn’t have enough money. Meanwhile, she’ll be praying the whole time that someone will send the money right then or that the vendors will extend credit. I mean, every day she steps out in faith to make a go of it.”

To understand Mom Workman is to understand her deep, abiding trust in God. “She’s like Mother Teresa,” says Cathy reflectively. “A lot of people ask, ‘Are there still people like her left?’ I think there are – but few are as devoted. Mom Workman has given up everything to help those children and we know she won’t stop working until she dies. She just won’t.”

What about you? Have you felt too old, too weak, or just too ordinary to make a difference? God wants to be our leverage in living, empowering us to feel better about ourselves, more excited about our future, more grateful for those we love and more enthusiastic about our faith.

If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, God has given you His Holy Spirit to help you live life according to His perfect plan. Why not pray this simple prayer and by faith invite Him to fill you with His Spirit:

Dear Father, I need you. I acknowledge that I have sinned against you by directing my own life. I thank You that You have forgiven my sins through Christ’s death on the cross for me. I now invite Christ to again take His place on the throne of my life. Fill me with the Holy Spirit as You commanded me to be filled, and as You promised in Your Word that You would do if I asked in faith. I pray this in the name of Jesus. As an expression of my faith, I thank You for directing my life and for filling me with the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I guess it’s only natural for kids to re-enact the stuff they see around them

You see, I spent a lot of time in church as a child. Bible studies, meetings, two worship services plus Sunday school. We practically lived there. Not surprisingly, the same was true in the world of my Barbie dolls. They had microphones made from Q-tips, hymnbooks of construction paper and uncomfortable pews of cardboard. Even the sanctuary seemed to be inspired by the rather spartan trimmings of our real-life church with only a “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever” banner at the front.

Funny, I can’t quite remember which doll pastored our flock, but it was probably Ken. In any case, the Word was preached, and I helped many a doll to their semi-jointed knees while their plastic friends sang repeated strains of “Just as I Am.”

It all seems like eons ago and to tell you the truth, I haven’t really thought about it very much. Until last night, that is, when I realized that those dolls are quite possibly the only souls I’ve helped usher into the Kingdom (and somehow, I don’t think they count). Regrettably, what seemed so easy in childhood has eluded me as an adult.

It’s not that I haven’t thought about it. In fact, just the opposite. I’ve probably thought about it too much. The lively conversations between Ken and Barbie have been replaced by hypothetical witnessing scenarios. What I’d say. What they’d say. What I’d say back. The only problem is that most of this imagined dialogue has stayed that way–no more real than the imitation grass that once surrounded my doll house.

Truth be known, thinking about sharing my faith and actually doing it are two different matters, a fact I’ve only recently begun to appreciate. For years, it seems I confused thought with action. An honest error perhaps, but more likely a mind game developed to ease my guilty conscience. After all, thinking about taking action is better than doing nothing at all, right?

Even so, it seems pretty clear to me that I need to stop imagining and start doing; that my faith needs to be about more than just believing the right things. “Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead,” wrote James. And I’m convinced it’s not about thinking up good works so much as living a truly transformed life. A life where my entire being–mind, soul and body–has been touched by the lordship of Christ. Because until I express that kind of trust, I’ll be forever trapped in a world of powder pink furniture and immature faith.

From Canadian Challenge Magazine, Spring 1999 edition. Used with permission.