Who did you help today?
It was just a line from a novel. Hidden there, waiting for me to extricate it from page 256. Asking me to wrench it out of the paragraph and to exploit it mercilessly. To offer it to you dear reader for your consumption and enjoyment. Hoping that it might give us just enough indigestion to make us uncomfortable and try a little harder to become the people we are called to be. It all went something like this.
“So we’d come home from school, sling bags into the corner of our room and enjoy the Ovaltine and Anzac biscuits. At dinner we would sit around the table, Dad would look at each of us in turn and ask in a measured tone. ‘So who did you help today?’
We all knew the question was coming, we had heard it every day of our school life and yet somehow it still made us squirm, especially when we had to confess that we couldn’t think of a single person we had helped.”
The follow-on questions which were not spelt out in the novel were .. ‘How did you help them?’ And… ‘Was your helping effective and fruitful into the future?’ Ie Did your actions have lasting consequences for the person and the school community?
It didn’t matter if the ‘helping’ was unnoticed, unheralded, unrewarded or if we were thanked. The important bit was that it simply happened. That an effort had been made. And just as importantly, another effort was made the next day, and the next, and the next, until this pattern of serving others was integrated into our daily life.
They are not bad questions to ask ourselves at the end of each day.
Who did you help today?
How did you help them?
Was your helping effective and fruitful into the future?