28 November 2016

Genesis 8:15-19

Then God said to Noah, Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you “the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground” so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it. So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons. All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the bird everything that moves on land came out of the ark, one kind after another.

A decade ago, my youngest sister announced “I’m not doing Christmas this year. I have no hope.”

Now, to a family with a matriarch who lives for the time between Thanksgiving and December 25th, this was something short of a dying declaration.

My youngest sister and her husband had been trying desperately to have a child. Neither prayers or the best modern medicine were working. She was giving up. And miserable and left without hope.

That year, my middle sister and I decided to do what Peter has been preaching from the pulpit these last few weeks – or at least he has been bringing us slowly to the idea. We gave our sister a water buffalo.

CCUMC has always been a huge supporter of the Heifer Project. And I had purchased ducks and bees and rabbits as gifts for others. But never anything as large as a water buffalo.

According to the Heifer Project website:

Water buffalo are prized in Cambodia. Often too expensive for smallholder farmers to purchase on their own, water buffalo serve as “living tractors” for farming families in Southeast Asia. The draft animals can help families plant up to five times more crops than they would be able to plant by hand.  And rice planting is backbreaking work.

The gentle giants also provide families with milk rich in calcium and protein that can transform malnourished children. Plus, the fats in buffalo milk make it ideal for processing into cheeses that also help build strong bones.

My sister and I agreed. We couldn’t give our sister the family she so desperately wanted. We couldn’t provide her the hope she so desperately needed. But we could be the hope for another family.

Today, somewhere in Cambodia, there is a family who knows what a true gift of Christmas can be. And happily enough, in Greensboro NC there is a niece who was adopted from Kazakhstan. That makes two families with renewed hope.

P.S. Several years later, after my niece had joined the family, another Heifer Project gift made an appearance under the Christmas tree. My husband and I presented my brother-in-law with chicks… “to celebrate their new flock.”