Awestruck by Susan L.

  I am sure I have shared about the gift of an eraser when I was in a psychiatric hospital, Christmas  2008. I had wanted one because I was doing copious amounts of drawing while I was there. It was a necessity...to me. I was trying to communicate the only way I could because I was once again buried in the pain of the past. The staff didn't think an eraser was needed. My polite requests were ignored. I quit asking.
  On Christmas day, one of the more caring staff brought in Christmas Crackers for us: the kind with a silly tissue hat, a joke and a little prize. When I popped mine open with him holding the other end, out tumbled an eraser in the form of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. I remember the shock on his face. He knew of my faith and my repeated requests.
  It brought me to tears because the Lord had provided my only desire at that time. It was a mere trifle in the grand scheme of things but it had mattered to Him. I was floored by the planning it had taken. It was more than my little, broken, human brain could take in at the time.
  After watching the Star of Bethlehem, I got thinking about my little eraser again and the logistics and planning that went in to that precise moment. Just for fun, I began to write things down on a flow chart as I contemplated doing a piece of art around the idea. There's a phenomenal amount of history just in the cracker alone. The invention of paper, gunpowder, black and coloured inks, printing presses, writing, language...those are just the surface things. Toss in exploration, boats, emigration, and personal histories, like that of the man who invented this little amusement back in the Victorian era, and it boggles the mind.
  It took the invention of the wheel to make my cracker.
  It took Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden to make my cracker.
  Noah, Moses, David, John, Mary, Joseph and Jesus especially were all needed for this small gift. There would be no Christmas without them.
  It took God to orchestrate all the elements necessary so on that gray and dismal Christmas day I knew He loved me beyond a shadow of a doubt. I knew I was where I needed to be.
  I am going to need a bigger piece of paper.
  "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End," says the Lord, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty."