Breaking the bank

Ah, we're stepping closer and closer to that wonderful birth event. So another look back:

I was in West Virginia, again, for a Christmas. I had real ideas about what I wanted for Christmas. Concrete ideas. Ideas as strong as any on the Christmas Story movie. I wanted (tadda) a Lassie dog for Christmas.

They had been offering them on television on one of my favorite shows (and by the way I mentioned this to my grandboys the other day and they didn't know who or what Lassie was. Ughhh) and I wanted one. Nothing else as I remember, which is probably wrong since I always wanted so much.

But Christmas eve came and Santa was featured on the weather channel as coming in for a landing at such and such time in Fairmont, and I drifted into sleep knowing I would be awakened by a bark or two.

I woke the next morning, I scrambled down stairs and there under the tree was a Lassie ....bank. A plastic bank in the form of Lassie.

Clearly Santa had gotten this wrong. The message hadn't come through. Surely this was a mix-up that could be fixed. What was the statue of limitations, I wondered (or something like that).

I came close to a Lassie dog once when I was nine, having a collie I loved, but things didn't work out there either. Seems Lassie, and all her tricks, was for television.

Thinking of this I wonder, how many of our prayers are sent to the one who wants nothing more than to hear them as Santa requests? I wonder how many times we feel they've been misheard, they've been misinterpreted or they flat out weren't heard at all?

Perhaps it's our methods not our Master that is at fault. Just saying...