NASHUA – It sounds like something that happens in the movies.
A hard-working preacher running an inner city mission planned a Christmas party for hundreds of children.
She promised each child pizza, sweets, and a new toy, then got so busy running between homes and hospitals to minister to her flock that she forgot to make her annual appeal for help.
Ten days before the scheduled party, a secretary stops the preacher cold when she reveals that not a single toy has been donated for the party. Not one.
The preacher calls the local newspaper, asking for help. The newspaper runs a story, “Wanted: Presents for 400 children,” and a successful businessman, moved by the plea, steps in to play Santa.
“I couldn’t imagine myself waking up on Christmas morning and sitting under my tree opening presents, knowing 400 children in the city have nothing to open,” said Peter Paradise, the president of Homes by Paradise, a construction company in the city.
Fast forward to Wednesday morning at Toys R Us on Daniel Webster Highway when Paradise and employees Mario Faucher, Patty Haigh, Lauren Watts, Dave Hebert, Derek Glerum, and Matt Loftus showed up with an empty 1-ton truck and a shopping list for 400 children, split into 200 boys, 200 girls. The list was divided again into age groups from infant to age 12, which should cover all the children who will be attending the Tolles Street Mission Christmas party Dec. 17.
“I remember my first skateboard, and I thought, ‘a skateboard,’ ” Paradise said after he and his staff filled dozens of shopping carts with skateboards, trains, Barbies and Bratz dolls. Other carts were heaping with basketballs, soccer balls, bats, Doodle Bears, bowling sets, LEGOs, Tickle-Me Elmos, and artist kits. The list wasn’t complete without some board games like Yahtzee, Scrabble, Sorry and Life.
It took more than three-quarters of an hour for the group to get through the checkout, and at one point, due to the volume of sales, a register failed. Afterward, the loading went smoothly: Paradise employees pushed the carts through the automated doors to the empty truck waiting curbside. In thebiting cold, they packed the construction vehicle from top to bottom.
“It was a no-brainer to me, to step up to the plate,” said Paradise, a Hollis resident who runs the 20-year-old city construction company with Vice President Amos White. “The public sector is exhausted making donations to the tsunami and the hurricanes and the floods in New Hampshire.”
A little before 1 p.m., the truck and its attending caravan arrived at the Tolles Street Mission at 52 Whitney St. Mario Faucher knocked on the back door and the Rev. Peggy Smith, director of the mission, welcomed him in.
“How are you?” Faucher asks, quickly adding, “You better have room. See that truck out there? It’s all full.”
Smith, a Pentecostal minister who started the mission 17 years ago in one of the most destitute neighborhoods in the city, raised her hands to her face, palms together as if in prayer.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
Then she began to weep.
She stood as if paralyzed by her astonishment, tears welling while an assembly line of movers started passing bags and boxes into the mission.
“You’re gonna need a lot of room,” declared Lauren Watts, the Paradise sales administrator. “We have got a truckload, literally.”
“This is gonna be the greatest of all,” said Springstead who is in her 80s and has worked with Smith since the mission was founded. “You should see the mothers that come in on Tuesdays, digging in the boxes, asking, ‘Do you have shoes?’ The precious little children, they come look at me, ‘Do you have toys?’ ”
The construction company employees continued to pile boxes and bags into every corner of the backroom while mission workers watched, not quite believing what they saw.
“You have allowed yourself to be God’s hands,” Smith told Paradise, giving a long, heartfelt Pentecostal blessing that went on for several minutes. “I came to the back door and I looked and I saw all those toys, all loaded up in a truck and all I could do was look. I just stood there and I just looked. I looked at the word of God being fulfilled. From my eyes, I’d never seen such a thing.”
“I know God loves a cheerful giver and we’re happy,” Paradise said.
Smith clapped her hands together in the same gesture of prayer.
“Thank you so much,” she said.
The mission workers gathered around her, moving closer, wearing the same astonished expression.
“Look what the Lord has done!” Janis Jefferson sang. “Look at what the Lord has done!” the others answered, as they clapped their hands and burst into song, just like in the movies.
