[Morning Reflection]
How About We Turn Around?
It was like we were thinking the same thing. She turned her face towards mine, and I could see the concern in her eyes. I was feeling it as well, but I wasn’t as fast thinking through the situation as she was.
That happens a lot actually. Although my wife will freely admit to have a somewhat prickly exterior sometimes, it covers a heart that often cares too much, which can cause her to hurt if she’s not careful.
On Saturday night, she was hurting.
We’d just come out of a family dinner at a restaurant, and were just about to get into our car, when a woman came around the side of another car, pretty suddenly, like she almost appeared out of nowhere.
She carried a sign, was saying something in a language I didn’t understand, and she had a young girl with her. I was too busy reacting to her seemingly sudden arrival to emotionally be open, but I could read the sign well enough.
It said that she had lost her job, and needed money for food and rent.
I wish I could tell you that I helped her right then, but I didn’t.
She was walking pretty fast, and she seemed to go right on by, as though she wasn’t expecting anything. Between trying to process what she said and trying to process the suddenness of her arrival, I’m sad to say that I let her go by without doing anything to help.
As it happened, I didn’t have any money on me at the time, and rather than stopping and thinking it through, I took the wrong way out, and got in our car and we drove away.
But I’m glad to say that we didn’t get very far.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, I was already feeling sad about my choice in the moment. I try to help whenever I can, and I feel like I had let that poor woman down, and not lived up to the ideals I try to live by. As we drove along the road, I heard the words of one of my mentors come into my mind, and it made me realize what I had to do.
My mentor had said, “If somebody asks, and I can give, I give”.
As I was struggling through the emotion of the moment, trying to decide how best to correct my mistake, my dear sweet wife turned to me and said “I just can’t get that woman out of my mind, I wish there was something we could do to help her”. I could see how much it was bothering her, as tears were welling up in her eyes. So I offered these words to her, quietly and gently….
“How about we turn around?”
She immediately agreed, and started looking through her purse. As we pulled back into that parking lot, our eyes scanning everywhere we could see, there was a definite sense of fear and uncertainty.
What if we had missed her; what if our moment of inaction and uncertainty had caused us to miss a chance to help someone who seemed to need so much.
And then we saw her sitting on the side of the roadway.
As we drove up, my wife was out of the door almost before I had the car stopped. I don’t know what she said to this woman, but I could tell by her eyes as she got back into the car that she was so moved by the plight of this mother and daughter.
As we drove away, tears were pouring from her eyes, and she turned to me again, and asked “how can we do more…how do we help someone like that?”
All the drive home she was sobbing in the seat next to me.
I held her more than usual on Saturday night, as she talked me of her feelings of helplessness in the face of so much suffering. I didn’t say much, because when she opens her heart the best thing I can do is just let her talk. So I listened as this beautiful soul just wept, and talked, and wept some more.
And finally, she found some small sense of peace, in the knowledge that she had helped where she could.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings