glowingjesusgirl

[glowingjesusgirl]

Chocolate Coins

By Jana K. Rego-Heins

 I stood nervously in front of the class in a royal blue bedazzled, sleeveless ball gown, white evening gloves with a tiara perched regally on my head. The one minute PowerPoint clip from a scene in the movie, The Count of Monte Cristo, was coming to an end. The clip is the scene where “Zatara” aka “Edmond” (Jim Caviezel) and “Jacopo” (Luis Guzmán) find themselves in an underwater cave on an island knee deep in hidden treasure: gold coins, gold crowns, and all sorts of precious jewels. Suddenly, with the same enthusiasm and delight that Jacabo displayed in frolicking in the immense treasure, I grabbed a handful of chocolate “gold” coins and flung them out into the classroom full of students. To my surprise and dismay, the students were not trying to catch them in greedy, hungry delight as I had envisioned in my preparation for the past several weeks, but instead, they were ducking from the “coins” for fear of injury as though my intent were to pelt them with solid gold shrapnel. What had gone wrong?!

Clearly this was not the reaction I had been anticipating.  

What brought me to this absurd moment?

In the spring of 2012 in an ongoing effort to complete my bachelor’s degree, I enrolled in a freshman level communications class. Although I was a senior, taught several classes of medical terminology, various massage classes and was the interim massage therapist program coordinator at Illinois Central College, I had missed this very basic general education requirement.

Truth be told, I was excited about the class. I had chosen a section of

Communications 110 taught by Professor Joseph Chianakas. Professor Chianakas was not only an outgoing, dynamic, all around funny guy, but he had also been the high school communications instructor for four of my seven children before he had accepted a position at Illinois Central College. I had become acquainted with him through parent teacher conferences for my children. Oddly, I felt pressure to perform well because my children had all done well in his classes. I did not want to be the one in our family to get less than an excellent evaluation from him.

The first day of class Mr. Chianakas went over the syllabus and described the three public speaking assignments that had to be completed successfully to fulfill the class requirements. Many groans, concerns, and complaints ensued. Mr. Chianakas words of comfort were that there would be several weeks of lecture and discussion before any public speaking began. True to his word, during the first few weeks the class examined the definition of and various forms of communication. We discussed the differences that cultures and subcultures had on communication styles, body language, and personal space. We also discussed the sympathetic “fight or flight” response that affects almost all public speakers to one degree or another, and coping tools for the adrenaline rush.  

Finally, after two and a half weeks, we received our first speaking assignment.

We were to give a five minute persuasive speech about a movie, music video, or video game. We had to use a one minute clip from the movie, music video, or video game in a PowerPoint presentation as well as at least fifteen still shots using different transitions, animations and formatting styles in the PowerPoint for visual aids.  Additionally, Mr. Chianakas said he wanted us to have an attention getter in our introduction. He stressed this several times. He wanted us to do whatever it took to capture the audience’s mind right from the start. The first presentations would start in three weeks. I was one of two non-traditional students in the class, and almost everyone else was already trembling, so I volunteered to present first. I really wanted to impress Mr. Chianakas, clearly an issue of family and personal pride was at stake.  

The movie choice was easy, The Count of Monte Cristo. To make sure I really liked it I watched it again with my husband, Kris, who had never seen it. I took notes of possibilities for the one minute clip and ideas for the still shots. As I pondered the assignment, a vision began to form for my introduction. I would present in costume as a Countess wearing a fancy ball gown, evening gloves, a tiara, and I would toss out to my audience gold coins made of chocolate!  

I knew that making the PowerPoint was going to be the most time consuming aspect of preparation since I was unfamiliar with some of the tools we were required to use. I learned how to take a clip from a YouTube video and insert it into the presentation. I also learned to use the animations for entry and exit of slides and different frames and shadows for the pictures. It was exciting to discover features of PowerPoint that I had never used before. Once I was satisfied that I had met all of the requirements for the presentation I began pulling together the elements of my attention grabber.  

My daughter Angela had been in the prom court or prom queen all four years in high school, so I had quite a collection of tiaras and dresses from which to choose. Any of the dresses would look ridiculous on me because I was a 50+ year old woman playing dress up in a ball gown, but I finally selected a strapless, royal blue, silver bedazzled full length dress that laced up in the back. I remember making the comment when I bought this particular dress for Angela that it was so expensive and beautiful I was going to find some occasion to wear it myself, I joked that maybe I would use if for a wedding dress if I ever got married again. With the costume chosen I felt that so far my plan for a “big opening” was going well. The finishing touch would be the chocolate gold coins to toss to my classmates. I was getting so excited about this introduction that I could not sleep at night. My desire to impress my children’s speech teacher/college professor was now bordering on obsession.

I began my quest for chocolate gold coins about a week before the presentation. My initial efforts to find the prize were at Dollar General, Walmart, Walgreens, Target and the like. If it had been Christmas time I probably could have found them at any of these stores, but it was now couple of weeks before Easter and there were none to be found. I refined my search to specialty stores like Party Barn and Party City. Much to my chagrin I could not find chocolate coins anywhere! Time was running out, I was only a day away from my presentation! On the edge of panic, I contemplated changing the introduction, but every other idea I came up with paled in comparison to the chocolate coins. Additionally, I had already made my PowerPoint presentation with the one minute clipped scene to jibe with the chocolate coins intro. What was I to do? I did what I have found is the best thing to do, I asked Jesus to help me. This was not a fancy formal prayer, more like a sigh, "Jesus help me!" I was a little embarrassed praying for such an insignificant thing, but impressions came that if it was important to me then it was important to Him. Somehow, I expressed to Him my growing concern that I had not been able to find the chocolate gold coins. All I understood in response was that He was listening and He was the provider, yet I had no clear direction except to keep looking.

I went back to Target because it was the department store closest to where I worked. (This was the equivalent of looking under the streetlight for a coin that you lost in the dark end of the street.) I ventured over to the seasonal section with a bit of renewed hope, after all, it was Easter time and even though gold coins did not fit the Easter story, I thought perhaps I might find thirty chocolate silver coins, I could make that work, but no. I then searched the candy aisle, again nothing but Easter egg M&M’s and traditional candy. I was beginning to feel like all was lost. I did not have time now to come up with and prepare for an alternative for my “big opening”. I was wondering why I had been so stubborn and had not changed my plan a week ago when there would still have been opportunity...

I was in a pouting daze wandering around the store when I came to myself standing in the baking aisle facing rows and columns of flour. There was self-rising flour, all-purpose flour, unbleached flour, bread machine flour, cake flour, etc. Rousing myself to full alertness I wondered what had brought me to that aisle. I am allergic to gluten and have not been in the flour aisle for years. I stood staring at the rows and columns of different types and brands of flour in different sized bags and then chastised myself for wasting time. I needed to be doing something, pouting was not going to solve this problem, and neither was staring at bags of flour, but what was I to do now! I took one more look at the rows and columns of flour began to turn away. As I turned I noticed that all of the columns were adjacent to each other, bag touching bag in each row, except for a hand width space about the middle of the second row. Something drew me to that unexplained space. It was not big enough to be a missing column of flour bags, too narrow. Why was there a space there? I looked closer and nothing was there as far as I could see. I was strangely intrigued by this. I am not sure why I was so intrigued, or why I even noticed it, but I soon found myself sticking my hand into the nothingness, reaching far back to find out what, if anything, was there. At full arm extension, my shoulder pressed against the surrounding bags of flour, I reached with my fingers and touched something. It felt like fine plastic netting, like the kind of fine plastic netting which contained the chocolate coins of my childhood Christmas stockings. Puzzled, I closed my hand around the netting covered objects and drew them out of the darkness of the flour filled shelves into the light. Opening my hand I squealed with delight! I put my arm back into the crevasse and touched more netting. I pulled that out too. Over and over I repeated this process squealing with more delight each time, because there hidden in the abyss in back of all the bags of flour were at least ten bags of chocolate gold coins! I was blown away! Barely able to contain myself, I quickly took my treasure to the cashier. When she tried to ring the coins up, she said that her register did not recognize the item, the coins were not in the system. I laughed and said of course they were not in the system because Jesus had just made them for me. She did not quite know what to think of that response. Smiling and ready with good customer service, she charged me a dollar a bag and rang them up manually. I broke out in praise songs as I left the store. Even in this, a matter of pride, Jesus proved exceedingly faithful to me!

Now, in front of the class, I was seeing that the chocolate coins may have been too much of a success, the students’ first impression was that they were being bombarded with heavy coins that could injure them. I broke character and paused my “big opening” for just an instant to calm the audience and exclaimed, “It’s okay, these won’t hurt you, they are only chocolate!” As soon as the students perceived that they were not in physical danger they began to smile and collect the chocolate coins. From that point on the presentation was a great success. During the Q&A following, one of the students asked me if I was “Mercedes”, the Countess, from the movie. I was flattered and amused. Mr. Chianaka’s comment at the end of the Q&A to the students was, “The bar has been set high for the rest of you” and to me, “Wow, now I know where your kids get it from!”

Thank you, Jesus, you are the God Who Provides in every need, even the little ones!