So many blessings in just one of those days

Words can be songs, Music to our ears, Joyful, inspiring, Comforting through tears. Words can be uplifting, As their role they play, Adding cheer and laughter, Brightening up the day.

It was a three-way conversation; me, Sarah, and Mike. I thought Sarah was a little quiet, so I asked if everything was OK.

“Oh, it’s just been one of those days. A friend was buried today and I couldn’t be at the funeral, but I wrote a letter to his wife, telling her how wonderful he was,” she said.

“I dropped my phone into the washing up. It took a morning in a tub of rice on top of the radiator for it to work again. A support-leg broke off my bed, so I propped it up with books. So, you know...”

“Good, good,” said Mike. For a second, I thought he must not have been paying attention.

Then he carried on: “So, it’s been a day of reaching out in love and finding ingenious ways to overcome difficulties. One of those days. Good, good.”

And, for the first time in our conversation, Sarah smiled!

“Another donation,” Stacey said, handing me some money.

“A hundred pounds,” I noted. “For the foodbank? Same as last time?”

“Yes. Except last time it was from my mum. This time it’s from my aunt.”

I asked if her aunt had been inspired by her sister. “Ohh, don’t ever suggest that,” Stacey scoffed. They live next door to each other but they’re always falling out.

They would hate to think they were doing the same as each other.”

And yet, I thought, in a time of national emergency, when so many people were in real difficulties, both of them dug into their purses and gave more than could be reasonably be expected to people they would never meet! Perhaps it is because they are so alike, they get along so fractiously.

Perhaps realising that would help them love each other like they love others. Because, with such generous hearts – what’s not to love?

Mandy got sunburned yesterday. She knows about sun cream, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. Her front garden was tiny. Cutting the grass shouldn’t take more than five minutes.

But, once she’d finished, it seemed a shame to leave her neighbour’s grass uncut.

Sitting on the steps after that, she looked across the road to the row of sheltered housing.

The woman who lived across from her was elderly and recently widowed. Signalling through the window, Mandy pointed to the garden then held up the mower.

When the woman thanked her afterwards, she talked about how much she used to enjoy sitting in her back garden but the council services had been cut right back and her garden was like a jungle now. So, five minutes somehow turned into two hours without sun cream.

There was one good thing about Mandy’s sunburn, though. If she blushed while I praised her kind and generous heart – I couldn’t tell! When Susan opened her café a few years ago, she wanted it to make more than money. She wanted it to be a part of the community, bringing people together and helping those in need.

She succeeded and lots of people were helped by going there.

But it was not immune to the lockdown. Before she closed up, she made sure the food she had in stock went to people who were likely to need it, then she took phone numbers from her customers who were living alone, to check up on them.

Except, it didn’t work out quite like that. Now, hardly a day goes by when a customer doesn’t phone her, just to see how she is coping.

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “But its not what I meant to happen.”

“It’s one of those unavoidable truths,” I told her.

“You can’t put love out into the world, without receiving love back.”