Out of the 7 billion people in this world, I saw you.
It was yesterday. You let a lady cut in line at the supermarket. An elderly lady. She was wearing a plastic COVID face shield, toting a fanny-pack oxygen cylinder. I watched you follow this woman to her Nissan Altima and load her groceries.
And last week I saw you. You were mowing a lawn. You, your teenage son, and your friends had all organized a weekly lawn maintenance schedule for a man whose legs were amputated due to diabetes. You work free of charge.
It was also you who returned my neighbor’s dog when the animal went missing. You hiked through four miles of backwoods with a pocketful of dog treats, calling its name. You aren’t even from our town. Someone told me you were vacationing here from Oregon.
Oregon, of all places. The Beaver State.
You sent money to 16-year-old Sara, a terminal cancer patient, as part of an online fundraiser. Altogether Sara raised nearly one hundred thousand bucks before she
died. And while you couldn’t save her life, you certainly showed the world how beautiful her life was.
You adopted a baby with fetal alcohol syndrome even though you are 56 years old and have already raised three children.
You donated blood.
You donated a stack of Louis L’Amour books to our local library. For which I can’t thank you enough.
And those are just the apparent things you did. What about the itty-bitty everyday things you do? Things nobody sees?
Like when you held the door for the gal walking into the Dollar General.
Or when you handed a few bucks to the guy outside Walmart who held a handwritten sign reading: “Hungry.”
Or how about each time you put on your scrubs to work a double shift in the emergency department? You administer IV fluids, take patient samples, and supervise a junior staff of…