Ethel and Mites

Ethel has served four separate terms as LWML president.  She dutifully colors in her missions project poster each time another one is announced as completely funded.  Quilts stitched with her handiwork are warming people all over the inhabited world.

She always places the coins she finds in the corner of the couch into her mite box.   Any change that makes it all the way to the laundry room is deposited in that mutilated Pringles can with the printed out LWML Mites label (you know the one with the poor looking kids on it).  She proudly pours out the coins at each meeting.  She assume the one who makes the most commotion in emptying their box was most faithful that month.

After decades of faithful mites giving, Ethel sat down the other night and decided to read through the account of the Widow’s Mite.  She thought it might be great inspiration for a skit at the Fall Workshop.    But sadly, she was instead dismayed.    Amazingly, what the widow brought into the temple treasury was not some change that she had left over in the laundry.  Jesus did not look at her and say, “Blessed is this widow, for she has placed into the treasury that which she had little use for anyway.” 

Ethel went to the next meeting with a passion.  As the ladies began to grab the change out of their pockets and purses, she said, “Not so fast ladies.” She went around the table and began to grab mite boxes one after another and cast them to the ground.  Change went flying everywhere.  Pennies rolled to the end of the church basement.  Next, she went back around around and cleared out everyone’s wallet.  She left them bare.  Everyone just sat quietly.  Ethel had never been aggressive in her whole life.  The treasurer simply reported, “Mites totaled $624 dollars for the month, as well as various gift cards and three sticks of sugar free gum.”   Ethel just smiled.

Then she stood up and declared, “And oh yeah, Pastor says purple is not the color of gladness either.  It is the color or repentance and mourning.  We, ladies, will wear fuchsia.”  She took of her hand embroidered LWML purple cardigan to reveal a shirt of a color that surely could not be mistaken as representing anything other than rejoicing.   Ethel walked out of the room with a bounce no one had seen in decades.  LWML would never be the same.