Movin' Mountains

the long version

Meet Charity Lynne Waller, a seven-year-old girl with blue eyes, freckles and dark brown hair just long enough and just wavy enough to get snarly all by itself. Charity's parents taught Christ by example - even when it meant selling their home, moving their five youngsters into a two-bedroom house trailer and pulling it to another state. The Waller kids didn't realize they were having "hard times." They just thought it was another family adventure. "The next big delay was when we crossed the stateline into Pennsylvania. It was Friday afternoon and the transportation office was closed until Monday, and we needed a permit. We stopped at a small grocery-gas station and Daddy got permission to park along the edge of the lot with bleachers and a ball diamond at the far side. A coach invited us to watch the ball games. After about three innings, Johnnie and I climbed down to play behind the bleachers. The weeds under those things were full of empty bottles. At two cents apiece, there was a small fortune in bottles under there. We made six or seven trips back and forth to the grocery store and by the time the fourth softball game was over we had $1.14. All from empty bottles! It wouldn't have taken us so long to get them all, but we had to stand next to some people and wait for them to finish drinking from their bottles. 'Do you think God gives people pop bottles?' I asked Daddy later. 'What?' 'Well, we gave God our candy money in Sunday school, and then today we found them bottles.' 'Charity, you can't outgive God,' Daddy explained to me. And I knew for sure that it was true."