The Boy Who Emptied His Piggy Bank

Pastor Cole stood up that night, in the middle of a living room still short a few pieces of furniture, and told the story of the widow’s two mites again, the way he had that November Sunday, except this time he pointed straight at my son, who tried to disappear behind my coat and could not quite manage it. He said something I have written down and kept, because I never want to lose the exact words. He said the whole of Bethel Grove had been reminded, by an eight year old boy who rarely says a full sentence to strangers, that generosity was never about the size of what you have. It is about the size of what you are willing to let go of.

There is a photograph Ida Renner took that Sunday, from her phone, three rows back, that somebody printed out and gave to Pastor Cole to hang in the fellowship hall. It is not a good photograph. It is blurry and a little dark, taken too fast to focus, and all it really shows is a small boy in a blue church shirt with his back to the camera, standing at the front of the sanctuary with an empty plastic pig hanging from one hand. I have looked at it more times than I could count. I keep thinking about the fact that in the moment it was taken, Hollis did not know a single thing about what was coming, not Wendell Cutter’s envelope, not Elias Yoder’s hay money, not the bicycle, not any of it. He was just a boy giving away the only sixty dollars he had, expecting nothing back, because a girl he liked needed it more than he needed a bike. That is the part of this whole story I keep returning to on the hard days, the days when it is just the two of us at the supper table and the chair at the end still sits a little too empty. My son did not do what he did because he thought it would start anything. He did it because it was right, and because Ray raised him, even in the short time he had, to believe that was reason enough on its own.