Just A Random Thought

On Facebook, there is a little application you can participate in called The Interview. You are asked to answer some random questions. I was on there today reading the answers some of my friends and family wrote. There was one question in particular that interested me, and I was somewhat surprised by the answers that different people gave to it.

The question is "Walking past a beggar, spare change or ignore?"

Years ago when I was a Girl Scout leader, one of the girls in my troop, Carla, talked about something similar to this. Her thoughts on the matter where that you never know who your guardian angel may be. It could be the little old lady who needs a hand getting her groceries to the car. It may be the guy who needs thirty cents for to make bus fare. It might be that beggar you pass on the street. In Carla's vision of life, doing good deeds for the people you know and love was only part of the picture. Helping out in small ways to those you meet in passing was the other, bigger part. Even if they don't look or smell just right, helping those people was far more important, because you are given a chance to make a very small decision that may change that stranger's life, even for just a moment. Not every beggar is looking for the next bottle of wine. Some are truly hungry. They may be hungry for compassionate human contact.

I always felt like the girls in my troop taught me far more than I taught them. The way Carla felt about doing good deeds in life was one of those things. So, what do you do when you pass a beggar on the street?

A Holiday Thought For You

The weather in Phoenix today started out sunny and warm. It was such a nice day that I did not think about taking an umbrella with me when we went out to do our weekly shopping. So, as I was walking along the sidewalk from one store to another, in the rain, I brushed past a young man on the sidewalk with a scowl on my face, not making eye contact with him when he asked for 30 cents so he could “catch the bus.”

In an instant after I walked past him, I felt so guilty, because I have always believed myself to be a nice, benevolent person. Because there have been many times in my life when I needed something, and thanks to the generosity of friends, strangers or acquaintances I barely knew, I received whatever it was I needed without asking for it.

I have not thought about my friend Michelle in many years. She was one of those people who came into my life “for a season”, and who helped me out the kindness of her heart. I had known her for a couple of years, when I found out that my then husband had been unfaithful to me in a most awful way, a way that I can not talk about here. I went to an attorney to talk about a divorce, and found out that I needed $1800 to pay for it.

Later that same day, when I needed someone to talk to, I turned to Michelle for the comforting shoulder to cry on and the ear to listen. When I told her what was going on, she immediately, without hesitation, offered to pay for my divorce. I was astounded, as it had not been my intention to ask for a loan---I just needed to vent over what was happening. She told me that she had been left a trust fund several years earlier, that meted out to her $1800 every year once a year, and that she usually gave that money to her church, but that she thought I needed it more and that she thought her church would understand. And she made it perfectly clear that it would not be a loan—it was a gift from her to me. The thought of Michelle went through my head in those few steps I took away from the tatooed young man.

So, I turned around and walked back to the young man on the sidewalk. He had a surprised look on his face, but told me that he rode his bicycle to town, and did not want to ride it home in the rain. He was short just 30 cents for a bus ticket. He said he would give me a postage stamp in exchange. I gave him all the change in my purse, and shooed away his offers of an AA battery out his MP3 player, or the offer to play a song in his harmonica.

As I walked away, I still felt ashamed of myself, for not IMMEDIATELY offering to give him the 30 cents. I have always believed that we should be kind to everyone we meet, because we never know which one is going to be our guardian angel. That elderly woman, who is tottering along, blocking your path? That obnoxious child who is screaming at the top of his lungs in the grocery store checkout? That tattooed, multi-pierced young man on the sidewalk? Which one will it be? And because that 30 cents? Will it still “count” as a good deed done, because I walked on past with a hardness in my heart first?

Kindness

Ok, I am going into sappy mode, so be warned, click out now if you can't take the oozing from the following post:

I am not generally a poetic person or one who gets into poetry much, but I came across this one and it spoke volumes to me:

Kindness
Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

So, what does it say to you?