"Dear God.  Please send Daddy one hundred dollars for Christmas"

One of the authors of this web site, W. Slattery, is the contributor of this story.

Many years ago, before I was born, my father, who was in the business of finding oil for people in the oil industry, was having some problems for a while with his business.  He had not had work for quite a while, and since the oil industry has a history of having it's ups and downs, it would be a while before more work would come in.  Things got bad enough that, as the Christmas season approached, my parents decided that there was not enough money for Christmas presents.  My parents were not believers in going all out for Christmas but they did feel that buying good gifts for their children was worthwhile.  But not this year.  The money had to be preserved for food and rent.  There was no choice about it.

But that was before one of my older sisters decided to do something about the situation.  She decided that God could fix this problem so talked to him about it.  My mother told me years later that she remembered my older sister praying out loud before going to bed this one particular night, and my sister said to God "Dear God.  Please send Daddy one hundred dollars for Christmas."  Now, my parents were Christian people, and I am sure they had prayed about this situation.  And I am sure God did not ignore their need, but did decide that they would need to wait a while for the answer.  But for some reason, God decided to answer this prayer of my sister's in a very dramatic way.

As it happened, my father had worked for a Christian oil man a year or two before that.  The next morning after my sister prayed that prayer to God, this man called my father on the telephone (this would have been during the mid to late 1940s, so phone calls were quite expensive then), and informed my father that God woke him up the previous night and told him that my father needed one hundred dollars, and to send it to him the next morning.  So, after he sent off the one hundred dollars, he called to tell my father to tell him to pick up the money when it arrived by Western Union (as I remember) that afternoon.  He picked up the money, and I'm sure you guessed by now - there were Christmas presents that year after all.

This Christian oil man had an interesting story of his own, but I'll not relate most of it to you here, but suffice it to say that he was immensely wealthy (he is long since deceased and died broke because his wife was not a Christian and gambled away all of his money).  He told my father that God often woke him up at night and told him of individuals who needed money for various needs they had and could not pay for.  He always sent it and always checked to be sure it was needed, and of course, it was always needed just as God told him.  These people were, in most instances, people he did not know.  He, no doubt, had to hunt some of them down to find them and give them the money they needed.  But this one time, it turned out to be my father that God gave this man instructions to send money to - just when a little girl asked God to do this and just the amount she asked for. 

Who says there is no God?