Valuespeak

A LITTLE ACT OF KINDNESS

It was a dark and stormy night.

No, really – it was. Dark and cold, with a mid-winter snow storm swirling about, blanketing the world with its oppressively heavy wetness.

And not just outside. Inside my soul it was dark and stormy, too. It had been one of those days – you know what I mean? Nothing terribly tragic, just lots of hassle and frustration. Long, boring, unproductive meetings at work. Starter problems with the car. Bills. Children of various ages, with various problems and struggles. A nagging cold.

You know – dark stuff. Stormy stuff. Inside, and out.

As tough as the day had been for the inner me, it was the “out” part that was really bugging me as I made my way down the snow-covered street to the church, where I had a meeting. I’ve lived in snow country most of my life, but I’ve never developed much affection for what I consider to be a white, fluffy annoyance. Maybe it’s because I don’t ski; I could never understand why anyone would want to go out and intentionally get cold and wet. I think I inherited this attitude from my Mom, who used to say that the best place to be during a Rocky Mountain snowstorm is indoors.

In San Diego.

My meeting at the church went reasonably well. I almost forgot about the slush that was running down my leg and into my sock as a result of the spill I took on the un-shoveled sidewalk that led from the parking lot into the church. I was getting ready to go home when I heard the unmistakable sound of spirited teenage boys coming into the building.

“Hey, guys – what’s going on?”

They weren’t expecting to see me, and they were trying to hide something behind them. “Uh . . . nothin’,” the smallest of the four teenagers said. “We’re just . . . uh . . . coming in to . . . uh . . . get a drink of water.”

“Yeah,” another boy said. “We need some water.”

“We’re thirsty,” added a third.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I can see where you’d get thirsty out there in that hot, dry weather.”

The boys laughed nervously. I would have laughed, too, but I wasn’t really in a laughing mood. “Come on in and get a drink,” I said. “I’m locking up, and I need to get going.”

“Well, we need to go, too,” said the shortest boy. “We can get water at my house.”

“Yeah,” said one of the other boys. “You’ve got really good water.”

The boys all turned and ran toward the street as fast the ice, snow and the snow shovels (snow shovels?) they were carrying would allow. I could hear them laughing and speaking loudly to each other as I clicked off the lights in the church and pulled the locked door shut behind me.

As I walked out to my car I noticed that something was different in the parking lot. The sidewalk had been scraped clean of snow and ice, and a thin layer of rock salt had been spread across the cement. I smiled as a mathematical equation formed in my non-mathematical mind: boys plus shovels plus clean walks equals a mid-winter service project.

No wonder they were thirsty, I thought as I smiled a refreshing, heart-felt smile.

When I got to where my car was parked I had to stop and laugh out loud. One of the boys had shoveled a path all the way from the sidewalk to the door of my car. He had even cleared away a little spot for me to stand while I unlocked my car and climbed in. Suddenly, my day didn’t seem nearly so dreary, and the night didn’t seem nearly so cold.

It was just a little act of kindness, requiring no more than a few minutes worth of shoveling. But somehow it was enough to make a difference for me.

Even on a dark and stormy night.

Value Speaking

WHEN THE RIGHT THING TURNS OUT WRONG

Joseph Walker

To tell you the truth, I don’t remember all of the reasons why Ernesto came to live withus. As I recall, my brother, who was living in Chile at the time, told us Ernesto needed a place tostay in the United States. Inviting him to stay with us seemed like the right thing to do.

And for a while, things worked out really well. Ernesto was a gracious guest. It was funteaching him American customs and helping him expand his English vocabulary and grammar.He had a pleasant personality, and his Latin good looks and charm were . . . well . . . charming.

Then the teasing started.

At first, it was occasional and playful. But gradually it became his way ofcommunicating with my sister and I, and it became hurtful. Kathy was going through a gawky,insecure stage, and Ernesto was relentless in pointing out what he thought were personality andfigure flaws. I, on the other hand, was a chunky child, and was painfully aware of how muchlarger I was than the other kids my age. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had started into the firststages of bulimia. I would skip lunch at school because I was embarrassed to eat in front ofpeople, and then I would take my lunch money to 7-11 to buy as much junk food as I could get.

It wasn’t much of a diet, especially since all of those empty calories only made meheavier. To their everlasting credit, my friends didn’t say much about my weight, and even whena thoughtless comment slipped out I tended to laugh it off. But Ernesto wouldn’t let it go.

“Hey, Gordo,” he would say, replacing my name with the Spanish word for fat. “Whenare you going to start sleeping with the rest of the pigs?” Then he would grab the layer of fataround my middle and pinch — hard — until I started to cry, as much from the humiliation asfrom the pain.

“Pobre cito,” he would say in mock sympathy. “Pobre bebé gordito.”

My parents asked him to stop teasing us — several times, as I recall. But he didn’t stop;he was just more careful about when he did it. Dad asked us to try to be forgiving.

“Maybe this is how people show affection in Chile,” he reasoned. “We just need to bepatient until he understands that hurting people isn’t acceptable here.”

But Ernesto saw our attempts at tolerance as weakness, which prompted him to press hisadvantage, threatening to make things even worse for us if we told Mom or Dad.

One night when I was taking a bath Mom inadvertently walked in on me. For the firsttime she saw the purplish bruises on my sides.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

“That’s where Ernesto pinches me,” I said.

By the time I got home from school the next day Ernesto was gone, and I don’t rememberever seeing him again. It was some time before I asked my Dad about what happened.

“Well,” he said carefully, “things just didn’t work out.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it wasn’t such a good idea to have him come and live with us.”

“No,” Dad said, “it was a good idea. It was the right thing to do. It just didn’t work out.Maybe it was his fault; maybe it was ours. Probably we all could have handled things better.”

Then he taught me an important lesson: “Sometimes we do the right thing and it turns outwrong,” he said. “Maybe somebody makes a mistake or handles something poorly, or maybethings just don’t work out like we thought they should. That doesn’t mean it was wrong. It justmeans that you tried to do what’s right, and you did the best you could.”

And that’s the right thing to do — no matter how it turns out.