Dear friends, Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
Meeting Santa at the Angel Tree Christmas party. (Photo by Kathy Marvin / Sierra Vista Herald)
Around the country, Angel Tree coordinators and volunteers are busy displaying the love of God to prisoners and their families as they prepare for Christmas.
Saturday morning I was in an inner-city elementary school in Washington, D.C., where a friend of my daughter is a teacher. What I saw and heard there broke my heart. Ninety percent of those kids lived in the projects, and despite the earnest efforts of teachers, many of them are reading far below grade level.
Rushing through an airport to catch a recent flight, I was able to take advantage of a moving walkway that sped up my journey – and then another. I was about five steps onto the second one when I realized it wasn’t moving.
To say that I am a person who “hates” waiting would be a complete understatement. For me, waiting feels like a total waste of time, an empty void where nothing happens except impatience, frustration, and annoyance. Whether it involves waiting for a scheduled appointment with the doctor, it feels like they purposely make people wait; or waiting for an inattentive driver to respond to the traffic light that has already turned green for at least a second or more; or waiting for my wife to get ready so that we can get to church on time, it does not take much waiting time for me to become thoroughly impatient and irritable.
Is your family considering participating in the Angel Tree program at your church this Christmas? If so, Prison Fellowship has a new resource available online that will help parents share with their kids the importance of serving families with a mother or a father in prison.