The Turkey in the Taxicab

Right after I received it with a phony gratitude, I received a phone call from a woman up in the hills surrounding our valley town. She needed a bird. I called a cab, put the bird on the back seat of the cab, and gave the cabbies her address and ten dollars. The turkey drove off, comfortably, in the snow that had just started to fall.

Later that evening, the woman from the hill town called. "Where is the stuffing and the trimmings?"

Power recognizes that we can't get a turkey to everyone. We can't even get it to most of the people who need it. But every now and then we can get one to one or two people. We can survive ingratitude. Ungrateful people can survive their own ingratitude. God will take care of the rest.

Salvation is the power to come home to our inability to save the poor -- and then to try anyway.

The Rev. Donna Schaper's new book is Spiritual Orphans or Spiritual Heirs: Raising Interfaith Children from Crossroads, 1999. She is a minister in the UCC. FAW carries two of Donna's books, Sabbath Sense and Sabbath Keeping.

Read each of Donna's writings: