Todays Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul

[Guest guest]

Just One More Time

By Hanoch McCarty

There's a 19th-century English novel set in a small Welsh town in which

every year for the past 500 years the people all gather in church on

Christmas

Eve and pray. Shortly before midnight, they light candle lanterns and,

singing

carols and hymns, they walk down a country path several miles to an old

abandoned stone shack. There they set up a creche scene, complete with

manger.

And in simple piety, they kneel and pray. Their hymns warm the chilly

December

air. Everyone in town capable of walking is there.

There is a myth in that town, a belief that if all citizens are present

on

Christmas Eve, and if all are praying with perfect faith, then and only

then, at

the stroke of midnight, the Second Coming will be at hand. And for 500

years

they've come to that stone ruin and prayed. Yet the Second Coming has

eluded

them.

One of the main characters in this novel is asked, " Do you believe that

He

will come again on Christmas Eve in our town? "

" No, " he answers, shaking his head sadly, " no, I don't. "

" Then why do you go each year? " he asked.

" Ah, " he says smiling, " what if I were the only one who wasn't there

when

it happened? "

Well, that's very little faith he has, isn't it? But it is some faith.

As

it says in the New Testament, we need only have faith as small as a grain of

mustard seed to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. And sometimes, when we work

with disturbed children, at-risk youth, troubled teens, alcoholic or abusive

or

depressed and suicidal partners, friends or clients . . . it is at those

moments

that we need that small bit of faith that kept that man coming back to the

stone

ruin on Christmas Eve. Just one more time. Just this next time, perhaps

I'll

make the breakthrough then.

We sometimes are called upon to work with people for whom others have

abandoned all hope. Perhaps we have even come to the conclusion that

there's no

possibility of change or growth. It's at that time that, if we can find the

tiniest scrap of hope, we may turn the corner, achieve a measurable gain,

save

someone worth saving. Please go back, my friend, just this one more time.