This morning, I read about how a businessman responds to a doctor's order to go to a train station and "look for someone who needs help." The doctor believed that if the businessman practiced doing something for another person every day, that man would begin to feel better about his life.
He did. It worked.
I wonder about the direction to "look for someone who needs help." What if that mission shaped my day? I wonder what it means to live a life that anticipates, on a daily basis, how I might serve another person.
Someone we'll encounter today will need something (a hug, a word, a ride, a lunch), and what if God wanted to use us to meet that particular need? What if each day we were on a special assignment to care for somebody in our path?
But we will not know who, where, or when this person might appear. We just know that it will, most certainly, happen. So we keep our eyes open, waiting for our special assignment.
I tell God I'm available. But I'm nervous--a little--about what shape the day will take.
The day transforms into an action-adventure film. I'm the one scanning the train station platform, looking for the helpless. But it's not the train station; it's my own street, my own neighborhood, my own office.
I feel like a secret agent on a mission from God. I feel like this covert operation changes the focus, the purpose, and the meaning of what it means to be alive today.
Living with flair means I'm available for secret missions to care for everyone and anyone, stranger or friend, who enters my life today.
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Journal: Who was my special assignment today?
4 comments:
Just what I needed, Heather, after being home with my sick-with-strep daughter for the 4th day in a row.
I think of how you saved me when I was tossed 202B at the last minute...you must have been on a mission even then. Thanks!
SOMEONE in our lives can always use a kind word, at the very least. And it doesn't have to be a stranger. It takes so little to brighten someone's day, doesn't it?
(Sometimes that someone can be ourselves, too.)
Heather, Thank you for the reminder to ask for God to show us who we can help. Thank you for your thoughtful blog.
You are so right with your post but what about people who only learned to care for others but not to think of their own needs? Is it not possible that the person that needs help and caring from me can also be my inner self?
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