Miracles upon Miracles

Seventy-seven years ago today, Donald Allen, aka "Tony" Gross was born in Cleveland, Ohio to an 18-year-old mother who had escaped the orphanage in which she was imprisoned from age five to age ten, returned to Cleveland by her older sisters, who took her from the Los Angeles institution where she'd been placed after their parents' deaths.

In 1993, this man, a veteran of the end of the Korean War, used his V.A. housing benefit for the first time. He bought a house for himself, his wife and his four year old son. The payments were high ($1300 a month!) but they thought they could make it. Indeed, they did and could.

More than eleven years ago, Tony passed across the ice fields of Whitney and into eternal life. This house was his legacy to his second family. In the course of years, a remarriage, the collapse of the mortgage industry, the financial difficulty of keeping a business afloat that seemed to hang just below the surface, only to gasp enough to keep the impression that it might revive, threatened the little legacy of the man born today who survived war to buy a house.

In the difficulty of knowing what to do, a dear friend suggested a conspiracy of blessing in which those who cared about the house's inhabitants, who were able financially, might donate in hopes of saving the house from auction. The friend prayed, contacted other friends, and in the midst of inmpossible circumstances, many dear friends did give. They not only gave, but also affimed and loved and encouraged the house's inhabitants. At the last, relatives gave to make up the difference. Now, the house will not be auctioned.

While that is a cause for rejoicing, the greater amazement is that in the midst of two months of uncertain craziness, a job was offered which created the possibility of doing what he loves instead of watching a gasping business die even more painfully.

As of this week, the house is saved, the burden of management is lifted, the dying business can be cut loose, because there is now paid employment doing what the house's inhabitant is amazingly good at...
The thanks is due to Tony. The thanks is due to Fawn, to our dear friends whose encouragement has affirmed us in the midst of trouble, rather than in the flush of success and the glow of good times. Thanks is due to the friend who offered the job out of the blue . . . and to the family members who were willing to make up the difference. But most of all, the thanks belongs to God our Father who has done far more than we could ask or imagine, not because we are cool or good or even OK but because He is good, He is love and He is tickled to do for us what we cannot in any way do for ourselves. Grace is a daily event, a staple food. But sometimes we taste grace and feel it to the depths of our souls and the marrow of our bones. This is one such day.