BY ROSE POST
SALISBURY POST

Sue Petrea doesn’t know which she’ll remember longest — the bicycle or the refrigerator.

Both, probably, and more.

Both were in stories told at the Sharing Shepherds’ decompression meeting after their Christmas trip to Big Sandy, W.Va.

Both years, since the Men’s Chorus at Salem Lutheran Church turned into Sharing Shepherds at Christmas, because they wanted to help people who really need it, they’ve had to have decompression meetings.

Sue, their chorus director, and her husband, Buddy, found Big Sandy, a tiny community in West Virginia that used to live on coal mining. But coal mining declined, and people moved, and those left are so mired in mud and poverty that it’s been listed as the third poorest county in the country. Ninety-seven percent of the children in the elementary school are on free- and reduced-price lunches.

And Sue is convinced that God wanted them to go there.

So for the last two years, school people have picked families most in need, helped them prepare wish lists, and the Sharing Shepherds have loaded trucks with specific items the families have wished for and taken them into the corners and crannies of those high mountains.

But when Christmas was over ...

“It’s an emotional time,” Sue says, “and critical for us. We have to get those emotions out to be able to go on for the year.” Have to share what they saw, because they all deliver their goodies to different people and see different things and find out if something needs to be done now, something that can’t wait until next year.

Like the story of the extra child and the bicycle that Tripp and Kim Rogers and Randy and Barbara Brown told at the decompression meeting.

They were taking bicycles — along with food and fuel and gloves and hats and goodies galore — to a couple with five children, and he was there, an 11-year-old.

“But there were only five bicycles,” Sue says.

“You didn’t bring me anything, did you?” he asked.

No, they hadn’t. They didn’t know he was there.

“It just broke my heart,” Sue says, so on the Saturday night before Martin Luther King Day, when she and Buddy were going to be off work and planned to take a refrigerator to another family, they bought another bicycle.

“But when we got there, he had gone back to his mother.”

With a new bike.

Malcolm Camp, a neighbor who’d grown up there, had taken care of the problem.

Malcolm is a self-employed electrician who reconditions things like breakers.

“And he makes quite a good living,” Sue says. “He and his wife live in a pretty house that’s as clean as a pin.”

But his heart goes out to the poverty-stricken, because he grew up right there in poverty.

Many nights when he was little, he told Sue and Buddy, “he cried himself to sleep wondering if his life would be like that all his life,” but he moved to Michigan and made something of himself and came back and started his own business — and it’s successful.

He and his wife and a couple other friends had bought over $100 worth of fruit (“because most of the people there never get any”) and gave it to their neighbors.

And doing that, they found the little boy who didn’t get a bike.

“So they jumped right in and got that boy a bicycle,” Sue says. “But he knew a 12-year-old girl who lives just around the bend who’d be tickled to get the bike we took. And it wouldn’t be any problem that it was a boy’s bike.”

They delivered it immediately.

Ditto the refrigerator.

Volunteers making deliveries had discovered that need. The family had a refrigerator, in fact, two refrigerators, but one didn’t work at all, and the other had only the freezer area working. So they’d punched holes in the freezer and hoped the air would seep into the refrigerator. But it didn’t work. The food spoiled. And smelled.

Someone in Rev. David Nelson’s family had contributed the refrigerator they took, and he went along. A former associate pastor at St. John’s Lutheran Church, he left Rowan several years ago, but now retired, he’s serving as interim pastor at Salem, until it calls a new minister.

And the family needed that refrigerator.

The only thing they might need more is rocks, Sue says.

“They’re about 300 yards back and around a bend and down a hill,” Sue says, “and they need a way to get in and out.” When it’s muddy ...

And they need a place to keep clothes. The pastor noticed that clean clothes were on the line and dirty clothes in bags in the corner because they had no drawer or shelf in the tiny house to put anything on. The five children slept in the same room, and chickens were running wild outside.

“But a coal stove was going, and it was warm.”

What they heard most at the decompression meeting this year, Sue says, “was that people were so grateful. We didn’t hear that much last year. I think they were stunned. This year they welcomed us and were openly grateful. We don’t do it for the thank-yous, but it’s sort of a measure of how we make them feel.

“Before we left,” she says, after they got the refrigerator in place, the father, who can’t read or write, “told us his post office box number and said, ‘I want you to send us a picture of your little church. I want to hear from you.’ Maybe the kids can read.

“Pastor Nelson said, ‘We’ll send you a picture, but it’s not a little church.’ ”

And then they noticed only a can or two of the food in the house.

“We asked if they had eaten it all, and they said, ‘No, we’ve got it locked in the shed, and we go get it a little at a time. That way if somebody breaks in, they won’t steal it all.’ ”

And Amanda showed Buddy that her handlebars on her bike were loose.

The bolts needed tightening, Buddy said, and got a hammer and wrench out of his truck.

“Now what will make these work?” he asked Amanda.

“And she threw her arms around his neck,” Sue says, “and Buddy said, ‘Now that will make it work!’ and it did.”

It was a good day, Sue says. They were following God’s command.

“We want to do His will, and his will definitely is to help those who need help. What we do, what we say, how we act all hinges on our faith. If our faith is as strong as it should be in our God, then our actions and our words will be what they should be ... ”

And what they should be surely will be to go back again as spring comes.

For the Sharing Shepherds, Christmas — and bicycles and refrigerators — lasts all year ’round.