[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
This is a hard story to tell. Not because of its subject. The subject is wonderful. A church in Fort Smith, Arkansas, hoping to help the children of those in prison, does all it can to make Christmas special by buying gifts on the parents’ behalf and giving them to the kids at a party held each December. Simple, beautiful, touching. Here’s the hard part: finding someone to take credit for the event.
The logical choice is the pastor of Community Bible Church, Kevin Thompson. He’s gracious and kind and easy to talk to. But he keeps directing the conversation away from himself. “The congregation makes this happen,” he says. “The team that works almost year-round makes this happen.” He mentions several people who know more than he does, including a volunteer named Anna Lane, and then he says, “Talk to Jim Kolp. Jim was there from the beginning, in 1999, when Community Bible was holding services in the old Phoenix Village Mall. That first year, someone donated frozen turkeys and we had to keep them for forty-eight hours before the party, so we filled the baptistery with ice, which was a hot tub if you can believe that, and kept the turkeys there.” Kevin laughs at this memory. And I decide to take his direction.
And so I call Jim Kolp, whose voice breaks when he talks about the kids he’s seen, who’ve opened presents, and whose eyes welled with tears because getting these gifts is a highly-charged and emotional happening.
Just as he’s beginning to really open up, he directs me to Shannon Pigeon, saying she’s the one to speak with. “She’s done so much for the Angel Tree Prison Fellowship Ministry,” he says, “and she’s just wonderful to talk to.” Shannon tells me about that first year, when twenty-five kids and their caregivers showed up for the party. She remembers the thrill of it, making Christmas happy for these sweet kids. She tells me the story of one of the workers, in recent years, who was in the checkout line at a local store, and was asked to donate to a Christmas charity. She told the checker she was already giving to the Angel Tree Prison Ministry, and the woman seemed to be overtaken by emotion. She told the worker she had been in prison the year before and that her kids had gotten presents at Community Bible, and what it meant to her, there behind bars, so far away from everyone she loved. Shannon says, “Isn’t that amazing?” It is. The scene shows all that is good about this program: these children getting gifts, the woman who’d spent time in prison thanking the worker who helped make it happen. It’s a full-circle detail that makes a story sing, and Shannon is happy to share it. But then asks me to please not focus on her in the telling of it, because she’s since retired from the program, and, anyway, she always got more out of it than even those getting gifts. She wants me to talk to two more volunteers who stepped in when she left and are working to make this year’s event even better. “You can’t believe how much good they’re doing,” she says.
At this point, the round-robin approach ends. I could go on and on, interviewing the next person in line, until I’d talked to so many people the story would implode. What seems evident is that I’ve come across a trove of reluctant heroes, and none of them is willing to take credit for the estimated 375 kids, eighteen and under, from Sebastian, Crawford, Franklin and Logan counties, who will open Christmas gifts from their prisoner-parents this year.
If 375 kids sounds like a lot, consider this. In a June 2015 report in the Arkansas Times, the prison population in Arkansas was listed at 18,681. In 1977, only 2,519 were in prison in Arkansas, so the tally has grown significantly for this state of approximately 2.9 million.
For these nearly 400 kids, facing Christmas can’t be easy. On TV, ecstatic families abound. At school programs, moms and dads show up together. Often, these kids are also facing economic hardships. Think about how your own family would operate if you lost one paycheck in your two-paycheck household.
That’s where Community Bible steps in. They work with prison chaplains, through the Prison Fellowship Ministry, who’ve gotten requests from inmates to add their kids to the list.
The week before Thanksgiving, Community Bible in Fort Smith sets up their Angel Tree. (They’ve already been in touch with the child’s caregiver by then to verify sizes and wish lists.) Church members pick an angel, spend fifty dollars buying one piece of clothing and one toy, and return it to the tree.
Meanwhile, volunteers are planning a big party for early to mid-December, with live music, food, and photos with Santa. Each family is given a gift box to take home that has everything, including a turkey, for Christmas dinner. Church members volunteer to sit at the tables with their guests, to make sure they feel welcome.
“You would be amazed at the connections that are made,” Kevin says. “We have one family that hosts birthday parties throughout the year for the kids in the family they met at one of our parties.”
But the bulk of the magic happens on the night of the party. Kevin recalls their very first year. He was sitting at a table with a boy, and they were talking sports. When the boy opened his present, he loved it. “I said, ‘That’s from your dad. He couldn’t be here but he wanted you to have this.’ A wall came up. He was just done. I was wishing I hadn’t said a word about his dad. And then later, when the party was wrapping up and we were walking out, that boy came up to me and asked, ‘Is this really from my dad?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, buddy, it is. Your dad loves you.’ And he just broke. This is what this is about. He knew his dad cared.
“We get letters from the prisoners. Sometimes both the mom and dad are in prison, especially if it’s a drug charge. We take pictures and make two copies, so the family can have one and the prisoner can have the other. If the kids write thank-you notes, we send them. Sometimes that photo and note is all they get for Christmas. Imagine how isolated they must feel, especially at Christmas. We want to take care of everybody, the kids, the caregivers, and the prisoners.”
The church is cognizant of everyone’s needs. If a family doesn’t want to attend, they’ll deliver the presents and food to them. Church members volunteer, often driving to the hills and valleys of rural Arkansas. They’ll also pick up the families if they need a ride to the party. And on that night, volunteers are on site to buy additional gifts, in case extra kids show up. They zip out, buy the present, wrap it up, and have it ready in the nick of time.
Kevin stands to retrieve a report that details the work that goes into this program. He is tall and thin, and as he stands, the light seems to surround him. He sits, tugs the knee of his jeans, stretches his long legs. He says, “Who gets the most out of this? The kids benefit. The prisoners. But I think it might be us, this church. Around here, we joke that watching the kids open their presents is the best forty-five seconds of the year.”
What started out to be a story about how Community Bible Church helps the children of those in prison, has turned out to be a story of how these children help the church. Maybe that’s why everyone I talked to passed the torch. They don’t see themselves as the center of this effort. They see themselves as the recipients of the grace that’s the backbone of their faith. Maybe that belief, that giving trumps receiving, is what makes this story special. Maybe it’s the perfect example of how the spirit of Christmas grows with each passing year, spread as it is from one caring heart to the next.
