Children receive a message from their mom or dad on their Angel Tree gifts.
This past December, Angel Tree took gifts and the Gospel to children with a mom or dad in prison all around the county. At Prison Fellowship, we’ve been hearing amazing reports from our Angel Tree volunteers about the lives and families that were touched through the program this Christmas.
A volunteer named Fran writes to us from Tennessee. She’s been involved in Angel Tree for a decade now, and at her church’s Angel Tree banquet just a few weeks ago she met a teenage girl named Taylor* whose mother is incarcerated.
Fran writes, “Before she received the gift, I wanted her to know that it was from her mom and that we helped out as a testimony of what the gift of Christ has meant to our lives.”
Fran asked Taylor for her mother’s name. She told her, and Fran asked to pray for Taylor and her mother.
As Fran prayed, Taylor buried her face in her father’s shoulder, sobbing. This was the first time that Taylor had heard from her mom in 11 years.
“I could imagine that the mom may have felt ashamed, thinking that her daughter might not want to hear from her. And the girl thinking that her mom didn’t care about her,” writes Fran. “I cried for this deep hurting that the mother and daughter must have felt, and I rejoiced that perhaps this was the beginning of communication between two people who are so closely joined in body and soul and yet so far away from each other.”
Taylor opened her gifts, and her dad said, “She got you what you asked for, didn’t she?”
Taylor nodded.
She laid the paper her gifts were wrapped in on the table. She began carefully tearing the wrapping paper. When her dad asked what she was doing, she told him she wanted to save her angel tag. “It has a message from my mom,” she said.
The words Taylor’s mother had requested be written on Taylor’s Angel Tree tag are precious to her–even more important than the gifts she received.
Angel Tree has opened up a line of communication between Taylor and her mother that they’ve never had before. Please pray that the message on Taylor’s Angel Tree tag will be the first of many more messages that she and her mother will share this year.
*Name has been changed to protect privacy.
