"Candy Making"

Tonight the youth group will be over at Eleanor Hawkins' house, making Easter candy. It's an old tradition, going back some fifty years or more. Eleanor lives out in the country, on what some would call a "gentlemen's farm." She calls it her truck farm, although she's never sold anything she grows there. She has large pens with blueberry bushes in them - the pens are to keep out the rabbits and birds. She used to just net them, which helped keep the birds out, but not the rabbits. And she has probably twenty or more grape vines, of all kinds. She found a catalogue of various kinds of grapes, and couldn't decide which ones to get - so she got one of each. It turned out that many of them were wine grapes. She didn't even drink wine, so she tried making jelly from them, and even thought of putting labels on them, like wine, with the variety and year: "Pinot noir, 1987," or "Reisling, 1992." She thought it might be a hot item at the church's White Elephant Sale, but it never quite caught on, and they didn't turn out to be quite what she had hoped. So, back in 1993, she started making the wine for communion.

The first few batches weren't too good. She found that the whites were acceptable, but the reds were a little harder to keep the oxygen out of them, so they all ended up tasting a bit like Sherry. People were happy only to have a little of it, and it wasn't exactly the church's greatest evangelistic tool. Every once-in-a-while, a new person would go up for communion. No one would tell them. They'd just wait, and watch for the predictable shudder and grimace, as the wine hit their taste buds. A few would even cough and sputter a bit, while the congregation, grown somewhat immune, would smile.

After a few years, however, Eleanor kind of got the hang of it, and her wines have gotten a lot better. She's one of those folks that will try just about anything and, once she's tried it, isn't satisfied until she's mastered it. The past few years it had to do with variations on air travel, it seems. Three years ago, her daughter bought her a hot air balloon ride as a joke, never dreaming that her eighty-four year-old mother would actually go up in it. But she did, and loved it. Two years ago, she followed that with a trip in a Cessna over Mt. Ranier. Last year she took a trip to Brazil with her friend, Margie, a youngster of only seventy-eight. She came back excited about going up in a glider over Buenos Aires. "You just feel like you're floating in air - it's so quiet and so peaceful!" she exclaimed to her daughter and her husband.

Tonight the youth is out at her place, and they are all making chocolates to sell at the church as a fund-raiser. She has boxes and boxes of molds. And they will dip cookies and pretzels - always a favorite of hers - and make chocolate eggs with designs painted on them. And at the end, she will sit them all down around the dining room table, with her best china plates and cups, and pour them homemade hot chocolate out of a silver pitcher, with a bowl of fresh whipped cream, and they'll have a few of their chocolate-dipped pretzels, or chocolate-dipped cookies, and hot chocolate, and they will all be amazed that this woman of eighty-seven would do this for them.

Eleanor only knows how to give her best to everything. Especially when that "everything" happens to be people. Like Mary, she empties the entire bottle and grace flows out, filling people's lives with joy, laughter and the sweet perfume of her love. She never holds back a drop.

Martha showed her love for Jesus by putting on a good meal. Mary showed it in her lavish gift-giving. Eleanor shows it with wine and chocolate, living and giving the gift of life God has given her to the fullest.

And that's what's happening over at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church today, a little church not too far from here where George Shulz is the pastor, a congregation that doesn't seem like much in the eyes of the world, but which is ever so precious in the eyes of God.