Ebenezer Scrooge, Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, and I have a long history.  I remember my mother getting a 78 rpm collection of A Christmas Carol sometime in the 1940s with actor Ronald Coleman as the voice of Scrooge, becoming fascinated with the story, and listening to it every year at Christmas time.  Down through the years I saw all of the movie and television versions.  Our son's fifth grade teacher gave him a copy of the book, which he proceeded to read every year; now he continues to read it every year to his children.  Our daughter developed a family tradition early in her marriage of going every year to a theater production of this enduring classic.  Now that we live close to her we have joined her and grand daughters in this family tradition.

I thought about all of these connections when on the way to the theatrical performance our grand daughters asked us to tell them our stories of Christmases past.  After seeing the play, I realized that I experienced a Christmas haunting with parallels to what Scrooge encountered.  In the 1980s we lived in a small village in upstate New York.  The foothills of the Appalachian Mountains surrounding our valley had many poor people who lived in primitive conditions.  One year, about the time our Christmas tree went up, I answered a knock at the door and found a scruffy young man with homemade Christmas ornaments to sell.  I looked out to the driveway and saw his beat up pickup truck, with his wife and two children in it.  These are the ugliest Christmas ornaments I have ever seen and there is no way I would put them on my tree, was the unspoken thought that went through my mind.  To the young man I said, "No thank you, we already have all of the ornaments we need."

Not more than five minutes after he had left my door, I was terribly convicted.  An inner voice said:  Dick, you missed the entire point of this encounter.  It had nothing to do with the beauty of the ornaments, or whether you had enough.  Here was a man in need of some resources for his family and you did not see and act on that even though you had resources to spare.  I kept hoping that the young man would come back.  As I drove around the village in the days to come I looked for that pickup truck so that I could stop and get those ornaments.  I was reduced to telling myself that maybe he would return next Christmas.  I looked in vain for him every Christmas afterwards that we lived in that village.  And when we moved to a nearby city, every Christmas I hoped that somehow that young man would show up at my door.  And now that I live in Kansas, I still think about this episode every Christmastime and every performance of A Christmas Carol.

So Scrooge and I have something in common, and not just the haunting.  We both had hearts that needed reconstruction; we can say together, "there but for the grace of God go I."  For it was not long after this incident happened to me that I came to experience God's grace in the person of Jesus Christ.  It was then that I knew the source of  that internal voice that convicted me that Christmas in upstate New York.