ValueSpeak
A Weekly Column
By
ACTS OF EVERYDAY HUMAN DECENCY
It’s cold here today.
A late winter storm has blustered into the area,
shocking the cheeriness out of the bright yellow crocuses that were blooming
yesterday in our flower bed. We didn’t
get a ton of snow – only a thin blanket of white covers the yards and streets. But a stern wind from the north has turned
the snow to ice, and everyone is once again wearing their thick winter sweaters
and coats.
Because it’s cold. The kind of cold that makes you feel sorry for penguins.
The kind of cold that makes Hades seem like a
lovely vacation spot. The
kind of cold that permeates every crack and crevice, and penetrates right to
the bone.
Yeah, that kind of cold.
This would have been a miserable day to be without
a furnace. And that was the prospect
Marilyn (not her real name) was facing.
Her furnace went out several days ago, and she has been unsuccessful in
several attempts to get a repair person to come to her home – especially when
she acknowledged that she wouldn’t be able to pay for the service call up front. A fiercely independent single mom, Marilyn
has been able to provide for her family very well until recently, when a series
of unforeseen events left her unemployed.
She has excellent prospects for the future, but for right now things are
a little tight.
And right now it’s cold.
When she came to church on Sunday a member of the
congregation noticed how cold her arm was.
She laughingly explained the situation and said confidently that they
would be OK – they had plenty of blankets.
But that wasn’t good enough for Kevin. When he heard about Marilyn’s plight he made
an appointment to go check out her furnace for himself. Kevin is handy, and knows his way around
mechanical stuff. But Marilyn’s furnace
had him stumped. So he called Brian, a
neighbor who has experience working on furnaces and such. Turns out Brian has
the exact same kind of furnace that Marilyn has. In no time Brian had the problem figured out,
went back to his house and returned with the parts needed to get Marilyn’s
furnace up and running.
Just in time for today’s cold.
“I can’t believe how lucky it was that you had the
exact parts we needed,” Kevin said as the two men left Marilyn’s suddenly warm
little house. “Do you have a spare of
everything?”
Brian smiled shyly. “Well, actually,” he said, “it wasn’t really
a luck thing. I just took the parts out of our furnace.”
Kevin looked at him, stunned. “So basically you shut your furnace down so
you could fix Marilyn’s?” he asked.
“It’s not a big deal,” Brian said. “We mostly use our wood burning stove to heat
our house anyway.”
“But what about the storm that’s
coming?” Kevin wondered. “It’s
going to get awfully cold and snowy . . .”
“We’ll be fine,” Brian said. “Honest. She needs the furnace more than we do.”
And as far as Brian was concerned, that was all
that mattered. Someone else needed what
he had, so he gave it to them. They
needed his skill, so he shared it. They
needed is judgment, so he offered it.
They needed furnace parts, so he transplanted parts from his own furnace
to theirs – even though it meant facing a late winter storm with only a wood
burning stove to heat his house. Call it
kindness. Call it benevolence. Call it compassion. Call it love.
All I know is when I see such acts of everyday human decency,
it warms my heart with hope.
Even when it’s cold.
# # #
— ©
E-mail Joseph
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