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This is a hard story to tell. Not because of its subject. The subject is wonderful. A church in Fort Smith, Arkansas, hoping to help the children of those in prison, does all it can to make Christmas special by buying gifts on the parents' behalf and giving them to the kids at a party held each December. Simple, beautiful, touching. Here's the hard part: finding someone to take credit for the event. The logical choice is the pastor of Community Bible Church, Kevin Thompson. He's gracious and kind and easy to talk to. But he keeps directing the conversation away from himself. "The congregation makes this happen," he says. "The team that works almost year-round makes this happen." He mentions several people who know more than he does, including a volunteer named Anna Lane, and then he says, "Talk to Jim Kolp. Jim was there from the beginning, in 1999, when Community Bible was holding services in the old Phoenix Village Mall. That first year, someone donated frozen turkeys and we had to keep them for forty-eight hours before the party, so we filled the baptistery with ice, which was a hot tub if you can believe that, and kept the turkeys there." Kevin laughs at this memory. And I decide to take his direction. And so I call Jim Kolp, whose voice breaks when he talks about the kids he's seen, who've opened presents, and whose eyes welled with tears because getting these gifts is a highly-charged and emotional happening.
Imagine how isolated they must feel, especially at Christmas. We want to take care of everybody, the kids, the caregivers, and the prisoner. Just as he's beginning to really open up, he directs me to Shannon Pigeon, saying she's the one to speak with. "She's done so much for the Angel Tree Prison Fellowship Ministry," he says, "and she's just wonderful to talk to." Shannon tells me about that first year, when twenty-five kids and their caregivers showed up for the party. She remembers the thrill of it, making Christmas happy for these sweet kids. She tells me the story of one of the workers, in recent years, who was in the checkout line at a local store, and was asked to donate to a Christmas charity. She told the checker she was already giving to the Angel Tree Prison Ministry, and the woman seemed to be overtaken by emotion. She told the worker she had been in prison the year before and that her kids had gotten presents at Community Bible, and what it meant to her, there behind bars, so far away from everyone she loved. Shannon says, "Isn't that amazing?" It is. The scene shows all that is good about this program: these children getting gifts, the woman who'd spent time in prison thanking the worker who DOSOUTHMAGAZINE.COM
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