Goodness is within us — if you look for it
It’s easy to wrongly believe that evil is triumphing over good, and that we have lost our collective goodness. Unless we purposely look for it. And act on it.
It’s easy to be scared into believing that we live in a treacherous and distrustful country if you focus too much on the 24/7 news cycles of negativity. It’s easy to wrongly believe that evil is triumphing over good, and that we have lost our collective goodness, unless we purposely look for it in our daily orbit.
This is exactly what I did over this past week. I opened my eyes, my ears and my heart to our goodness, our generosity and our compassion. Here is a sampling of what I found or witnessed.
Barry Halgrimson moved to Munster from Oregon to be closer to his daughter. He enjoys volunteering his time to causes also close to his heart.
“I make a fool of myself whenever I run across a cause that embodies love in any form,” he explained. “Kind of like finding water in a desert and diving in with your clothes on.”
Halgrimson has been diving in as a volunteer twice a week at the Food Bank of Northwest Indiana in Merrillville. “It just fills my soul with joy,” he told me.
On a Saturday morning, like most every Saturday morning, more than 500 hungry families showed up to wait in a line that wrapped around the building. Fortunately, nearly 100 volunteers also showed up.
“It really is a wonderful sight to see and be part of,” said Emily Cutka, the food bank’s director of community partnerships.
Volunteers of all ages and abilities — church groups, college sororities, chronic do-gooders, local businesses, nonprofit organizations — showed up to pack, sort and distribute food to hungry neighbors.
Some volunteers pushed shopping carts past stacks of canned goods, frozen perishables and fresh fruit. Other volunteers packed clients’ vehicles before rushing back inside. A few volunteers restocked stacks of food, or registered clients, or tried to stay ahead of the mounting piles of plastic wrap and cardboard.
It was a hot, humid day. The volunteers sweated through hundreds of smiles while hustling to feed the souls of clients hungry not only for food but fellowship.
“Man, this is how life is supposed to be,” Halgrimson said. “It’s just a beautiful mess of wellintentioned humanity, making the best of an unfair reality.”
Living Hope Church in Merrillville sent three dozen members to the food bank, all of them sporting bright red “LOVE WEEK” T-shirts.
“We had multiple events this week to invest and bless the community,” said Doug Sheehy, the church’s senior associate pastor. “Everything from the food bank to playing bingo at nursing homes, to urban farming in Gary, to writing letters to veterans, to preparing 40,000 meals with
Pack Away Hunger.”
In all, 538 church members gathered to perform 1,292 hours of loving gestures. While packing meals at the church, a few pizzas were ordered to feed the volunteers. When the delivery person showed up, he was handed a tip, pitched in from everyone there.
“It totaled $1,108,” Sheehy said with a big smile.
On another day last week, Roger Hayward, of Cedar Lake was “feeling a little funky” for some reason while driving to the grocery store.
“I couldn’t quite put my finger on it,” he said.
While waiting to pay for his groceries, Hayward sensed God telling him to pay for the groceries of the couple behind him in line.
“So I did,” he said.
The couple was stunned. “Their delight started to spin my whole attitude... for just a few bucks,” Hayward said.
On another day, Kevin Feldman, an official with the Salvation Army in Lake County, received a $500 check from someone who attached a message that they did not want a receipt.
“As I will typically do, I searched our (system) for the donor’s telephone number, so I could offer my personal gratitude for the gift,” Feldman wrote on LinkedIn. “I came up dry.”
But he found the donor’s email address, so he sent a message of thanks. The email reply welcomed a phone call. During their conversation, the donor explained there was a time not long ago when he was jobless and his young family was hungry, near homelessness.
For a few months, the donor relied on the Salvation Army Community Center in Munster for financial aid and food assistance, as well as caring people to share his troubles with.
“He will never forget, and now neither will I,” Feldman said.
On another day, a Valparaiso businessman shared with me an experience that profoundly touched him in a disturbing way.
“Because it exposed some of my own blindness and ignorance,” he said.
While dining alone at a Chinese buffet, a working class family of eight sat near his table. One of the family’s teenage daughters has special needs.
“She was not able to speak, but she was able to communicate with her mother and father,” the man said. “From the time they came in, I found myself unable to take my eyes off them, especially their special daughter. Normally... my main emotion would be pity. But not tonight.”
He watched the father feed a daughter who couldn’t feed herself, “without self-consciousness, without impatience, without a hint of complaint.”
“Watching him perform this service for her absolutely broke my heart. Because it showed me how blind I was to truly loving someone the way he so clearly loved her. And... in that moment I began to love her, too.”
The man quietly cried alone at his table. Then he asked his server for the family’s bill.
“Not because I pitied them,” he said. “But because I was so profoundly grateful for witnessing something that I have had many opportunities to witness but never interpreted as being proof to me that God indeed exists. And now I think that maybe I was supposed to be there.”
As Sheehy summed it up, “It’s been an amazing week.”
Yes, it has been. If you look for the amazing within us.