How many slogans do we see in just one day that go something like this “Change starts with just one person”? We see them all the time, on posters, bumper stickers and billboards campaigning for president, recycling, education, preventing forest fires, or maybe for taco bell. It’s a fairly used message that sounds really great to read and feels really great to think. As with these campaigns, trying to do what’s right in the world, indeed, starts with one person.
It’s not easy, being first. We often try to avoid it. For the vast majority of us we don’t like stepping outside of our comfort zones and being first. This is especially evident in watching a party of people eating their first helping of food at the dinner of certain host. Everybody eats, enjoying themselves, the food, and each others’ company until there comes a moment when people begin to realize that their primary portion of food is dwindling and nobody has yet to ask for seconds. Generally at this point, people look to the host, if he goes up for seconds, then so do I, is the mentality. But sometimes the host is a slow eater, not all that hungry or way too engrossed in conversation to go up for a second helping. At this point the guests begin to look at each other, each one waiting for the other to make the first move. If the host notices this, then he invites people to have seconds, all harm prevented and the guests continue to enjoy themselves. But sometimes it takes that one awkward moment where somebody gets up first and helps themselves to a second portion. It’s a bit difficult to be that first one and make that first move, step outside of the comfort zone and make it happen, but some things just got to be done.
But what happens when nobody follows suit? There’s that even more awkward moment when you find yourself at the buffet holding the ladle of mashed potatoes and realizing “Oh shoot, there’s nobody behind me”. At this point it enters your mind that since nobody else is going up for seconds you look a bit like a pig. Then you have a choice, take only a little and try to fit in with those who don’t apparently need more food, or take the serving you came up to get in the first place. Being first isn’t as fun as the bumper sticks let on.
However, somebody should be first. If there isn’t a first then there isn’t a change and everybody sits at table wondering what that second helping would have tasted like.
Neither position is comfortable, being first, or not knowing and we have to make a choice; do we choose to step out and be awkward or do we sit where we are and learn to be happy with a half full (mentally becoming half empty) stomach? How awkward are we willing to make our lives?
Let’s consider another situation. We all see that one kid at school, no matter how old you are you know what I’m talking about, there’s always that one kid who’s off by himself, either for a time or always. We can observe this kid for a number of days, learn his habits, watch his reactions (if any) to the world at large, see what he does from a distance and find out who he is by theoretical observation. We may come to feel for him, perhaps pity his solitude, respect his life, wonder about his emotions, or what have you. But if I may be blunt we really don’t know much more about him than we do about our average caged chimpanzee. We see, but we do not know. Why? Because we haven’t made the effort to learn, to ask. It’s a journey outside of our comfort zone to sit down with this child and find out who he is. If we want to find out more we have to be first, stepping outside of ourselves and asking about his life. Sometimes this is met with complete and abject silence. Ouch. Sometimes all we can manage to find out is his name, Jimmy. Cool, we now have a name to apply to this distantly observed child, we have found out only a little. It really takes guts to be the one to come back for seconds, to keep returning to little Jimmy until he opens up, if he ever does.
People like Jimmy are easy to have come and go. They make no impact on our lives if we ignore them, they make little impact if we are rejected by them, and they make tiny amounts of impact if we learn their names. But if we let them go at that point we find ourselves deprived of knowing who they really are. If we settle for firsts and don’t get up and get seconds how will we really know who they are?
Life is filled with the difficult choice of stepping outside ourselves. For many of us to do so is to invite a great many unpleasant experiences; we may have to fight past experiences, old wounds, past failures, feels, and mistakes to make the proper moves to step outside ourselves. Some of us never make the full effort to work through this, some become depressed and despondent trying to move from a life within to a life without, they find themselves unable to do it and retreat further inside. Some make the right moves but only so much, they step outside themselves and find a comfortable spot just beyond their comfort zone, their comfort zone is expanded, not moved beyond. Some have the saintly ability to move beyond their comfort zones like a comet, shooting out of themselves to find others and inspire them. But in all these cases the motion involves fighting yourself.
We like to be comfortable, or at least to pretend that we are comfortable. It’s why we watch commercials. Who really wants to be bombarded by televised messages telling us how wearing small pieces of plastic will make our teeth whiter? Or how this silver four door car is better than all the other silver four door cars because of its’ side airbag safety features? Or how buying insurance from this insurance company is the thing to do because so many other lemmings have done it too? Yet we watch these messages. Why? Because we are comfortable with not changing the channel, or we hope to see a commercial that will catch our attention, or perhaps we don’t want to miss anything of the show these commercials sponsor. For whatever reason we adjust our comfort zone to allow ourselves to watch what we would really rather not watch. As it is with the dinner table we pretend that we comfortable with only having firsts so as to not be uncomfortable with asking for seconds.
Yet the more we try to be comfortable the more we have to make a choice. We see and perceive things going on around us and we choose what to do about it. The world has problems, everybody knows it. So we donate money, we talk about it with our friends, we use our skills to help, or we do nothing at all and pretend with not changing our lives to help. We make our choices.
It’s like in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10, 30-37). Most of us have heard this one, please read it if you haven’t. The man goes on a journey, gets assaulted by robbers and is left for dead. First a priest passes him by without helping or taking notice, then a Levite both of them not stopping to help. A passing Samaritan is the only one with the respect for this enough that he stops and helps. Now Jesus makes no mistake about the message of the parable when he ends it with the words “Go and do likewise” meaning, in a simple, short way: help those who need help. But what of those of whom we are not to do likewise; referring of course to the priest and Levite?
It’s so easy for us to not help. We can probably think of a time as early as yesterday in which we did not help somebody in some degree of need. Does it occur to us to help even when we may not be the best people to do so? We have been like the priest and Levite before, not wanting to defile ourselves with the dirty work of others. And in some ways there is worldly wisdom in this; if you can’t help, don’t try, you’ll probably make things worse. What can we do to alleviate the sufferings of others? We can say: “I am a priest, I cannot touch an injured man” or “I am a Levite, I am too busy to assist, I have matters of law to attend to.” Or what have you. They keep their eyes on the road, where they need to go, not to the side where they only find distraction.
Then we have our Samaritan. Nowhere does it say that the Samaritan was a doctor. It says he bandaged the man’s wounds, it does not say that he did a good job, or that he knew what he was doing. He probably used the clothes he had with him to bandage the man’s injuries, not clean, sterilized cloth. After bandaging cuts with dirty rags he took a half dead man and threw him on the back of a donkey, which probably did all sorts of things to the poor man’s injured frame. Then the Samaritan led him to a road side inn and told the guy running the place to take care of this half dead man, brilliant. That’s the first place we want to recover from traumatic injury: a truck stop. And after all this medical torture, the Samaritan saved the man’s life, because he did what he should have done: helped.
It wasn’t clean, and it wasn’t pretty. True healing never is. Healing hurts. We have the crucifix to remind us of how much healing hurts. One look at it tells us that the wisdom of we “we should forgive because it makes us feel good” is a load of hooey. Forgiveness hurts. It forces us out of our comfort zones in very real and very painful ways. We all at some point find ourselves in the position of the man on the roadside, either by some fault of our own or by the misdeeds of others. And the only way to have our lives recovered is to get our wounds bandaged by dirty, sweaty, road weary rags get thrown on the back of a donkey and recover for weeks at a road side inn.
However, what if there is no road side inn? What if there is no donkey? What if there are no rags? Would the Samaritan still have stopped and helped? We hope, for the man’s sake, he would have. But we don’t know. Maybe he was of the mindset that the only way he could help was if he had a donkey, or rags, or both. Maybe he was only going to help as long as the man promised to repay him in return, or, at least, there would be some implication of repayment. Do we need an ambulance to help people? Do we need an IOU to do what’s right?
It never says the man thanked the Samaritan for all the kindness and compassion. Heck, some people might sue the Samaritan for neglect; for bandaging him up in such a way, or have been angry at him for “abandoning” him at a roadside inn. It doesn’t say what the man’s reaction is. And for good reason, because that’s not the point of being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, no matter how menial or uneducated our work may seem.
So, where does that leave us? It leaves us exactly where are, some four pages and I imagine ten minutes or so later. Only now I possibly you, like me, are wondering on some level how we break ourselves a little more out of our comfort zones and be like that Samaritan armed with the shirt on our back a very stubborn and smelly donkey and a small desire to do what we can. But we also have our God on our side, standing with us ready to handle the loads we cannot handle. And without this I don’t know how any of us can do what we’re called to.
So, apparently the answer to my question is it leaves me in Iauareté, Brazil. It’s a small village of about three thousand or so people, depending on who you ask (I’ve heard it’s between two to five thousand) nestled at the crook of two rivers that form the border between Brazil and Columbia. I live here with two Salesian priests, one other volunteer, a Brazilian named Franciclei, and six young men ages seventeen to twenty who are discerning a religious calling.
Our living situation is pretty interesting. Our house is the loft above the Salesian offices. Almost everybody in the church works directly beneath us. We don’t have a ceiling, just the rafters of the roof. I live on the west side of the building in series of rooms that belong to me and the two Padres. I have my own bathroom, which, of course, is nice. We have a simple TV room with lawn chairs under the rafters of the roof. Down the hall is the library, with all sorts of spiritual books in Portuguese and further from there is the classroom where they teach theology to the six young men, who live in a series of dorms down towards the back stairs. Downstairs from there is the kitchen and the dining room. All in all to get from my room to the dining room I have to walk about 300 or more feet, it’s a pretty big loft with all the fun problems of such: creaking beams, high humidity and of course, bats. Thank goodness the bats don’t come into my room, keeping the door closed all the time does that, but I never want to have one hit me in the back of the head again, thank you very much. If ever you want to experience a bat crawling in your hair I suggest you seek your thrills elsewhere.
Iauareté was originally a mission site, but some years ago the Brazilian government built a very small military base here, there is an airfield and runway, but it is only for military use, that’s why I had to come in by boat on a very pretty, but very long ten hour excursion through the Amazon. The military get along well with the population so there’s nothing to report about that. The airfield is here in case Brazil gets into an unlikely war with Columbia. If that ever happened I have a feeling that I would be Columbian pretty fast: there’s truthfully very few soldiers here, there’s no permanent airplanes stationed here and the local populous lacks weapons. Yeah, Iauareté would hold up in a war with Columbia about as well as a snow fort… in Brazil. Thank the Lord there is not much chance of any fighting anytime soon, if ever. Things are good in that department.
It’s a quiet, pleasant place with an overall good populace. And a nice, slow lifestyle that at first was ill suited to my American mind. It’s taken a little while to adjust.
I don’t think I ever really believed in the idea that a person can live on God alone. I never really considered it a possibility. This reality was changed quite suddenly in March when I found myself entering Iauareté knowing nobody, suffering a loss of focus do to events beyond my control in the United States and finding myself set back by the fact that my Portuguese (which isn’t as good as I’d like) isn’t indeed the native language of this city (to be sure, it is spoken here by just about everybody, but the primary language is ancestral Tucano, a language completely unlike anything my mouth has ever tried to speak). God was my lone refuge. He was the only person I could talk to for the first week.
It’s been an emotional ride, being forced to go from my safety of the United States, where I know so many excellent quality people, such a supportive family, and a bright outlook on the rest of my life to a small city of three thousand people in a region so isolated that I mentally refer to the outside world as “the mainland”. I have felt alone before, it wasn’t fun. It was an experience that still at times haunts me with the tremendous emotional power of loneliness. I felt, and still feel at times, alone. I had my God and that’s it. My health hasn’t been as good as I’d prefer having gotten sick a decent number of times adjusting to new food and a new climate. For the first week I didn’t even have internet. This, I think, is the first step for me to living a life within to living a life without: learning to literally live without in many senses of the meaning. And for the first month I was dogged by one solid question: what on earth am I doing here?
This question was especially difficult to answer after my first meeting with Padre Francisco, the vice director here and the priest who does the most work with the guys in the house (The other, Padre Nilson, the director, generally takes his work into the greater community). I had been having a bit of a hard time getting accustomed to the new life I was going to be leading when he called me in the talk about what work he wanted me to do. First of all, he wanted me to take religious books and retype them into the computer for printable access: digitalizing. Second, he had read my résumé and had discovered that I was a painter. He wanted me to paint some stuff and start teaching a painting class. Painting and digitalizing were the last two jobs I had in the States, they were jobs I was not interested in doing again for a good long time. My work here would be what I had been trying to avoid. Wonderful.
There’s nothing quite like not having something to make you realize how much you appreciate it. Not having my friends, family, bible study, car, or indeed a different day to day diet (Rice and beans for the win!) really made me realize what I had in the States. It was a hard awakening to see that I was now nowhere near there, five hundred miles away from anything that remotely resembled my home town (and that’s a stretch, the city of Manaus and Ann Arbor are hardly similar), and in a position in which I was barely able to communicate with the people I lived with. God was all I had.
I would do an hour of adoration plus a rosary a day for three weeks. Not speaking the language gave me the free time to accomplish such activities. I would pray when I walked, before sleeping, when I woke. It was the only thing that energized me. I would feel waves of the Holy Spirit, giving me just enough push to keep the day floating. But as they say; all good things…
A week before Easter came another rude awakening: I no longer cared that I was on mission. I wanted to go home. I wanted to take my energy and go back to the United States and be a super Christian there. I was pretty fiery at this thought. I had spent so much time alone with my emotions that I had built up a nice volcano of enthusiasm fueled by the prayer times I was having. It was a nice idea, go home with all this energy and change the world, until it because quite clear to me this, in fact, was NOT God’s plan for the moment. I am in Iauareté and will be here for quite some time to paint and digitalize.
I became somewhat depressed with my situation, fighting myself against all the emotions that wanted to go back home, to the comfort zone I had there. But I knew that, even if I was going home, it wouldn’t be easy, to get out here is, at best, two days by boat and plane, and there was no way I was just going to be able to hop on the next passing motor boat and say: “Hey, driver, can you take me on the ten hour boat ride back to São Gabriel?” No, not happening.
So I spent my Holy Week struggling with myself. I struggled through all the stages of loss; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, etc… I fought with regret, I fought with denial, I fought with unhappiness and just plain sluggishness. I woke up everyday wondering why I was here. It was not a happy time.
Holy Week is a time of preparation and part of that preparation is the holy sacrament of Confession. Confession is huge in Iauareté with just about all the citizens making a confession sometime during the week, a situation I find simple and beautiful. For this reason we need help with the large amount of confessions. Two priests are hardly sufficient to hear two to three thousand confessions in a week along with the normal preparations that come with a great celebration like Easter. So they always send in a priest from Manaus to help with the confessions and this time it was Padre Gennaro. I had become acquainted with him during my Portuguese training in Manaus and found him to be a bit rough, but likeable. I confessed to him all that I was going through.
I pity the poor people behind me in line. I have never had a longer confession in my life, though there was no problem with language barrier. It felt good to have told somebody what I was going through and what my problems were. He was very understanding and told me, quite frankly, that he, being a foreigner from Italy, understood how I felt because the slow, different life at Iauareté isn’t exactly what we westerns are accustomed to. He suggested that if problems continue maybe I should talk with my superiors and get moved to somewhere a little more city and a lot less country; like Porto Velho in Rondônia, or Belém in Pará.
Armed with this suggestion I was able to shake myself a little more out of my emotions and enter into the Holy Thursday celebrations. It was a fairly normal mass, as Holy Thursday masses go, with very little to report in terms of celebration differences. Though the level of participation from the community was pretty cool and the procession of the Eucharist from the church to the Eucharistic chapel was quite well done and beautiful.
Good Friday got off on the wrong foot. I was very tired from all the difficulties within and preparations for celebrations without and as such completely slept straight through my alarm clock and found myself crawling out of my hammock at five minutes to seven to a rather rushed Padre Francisco knocking on my door; we were supposed to be at the boat dock at seven o’clock. Opa (oops). So I was rushed, didn’t shower, brush teeth, or even go to the bathroom. Had just enough time to throw on my clothes and grab a slice of bread for breakfast. So much for all the good feelings of the confession the day before.
I will say, however, that crossing the river with the whole village was a neat experience. Some three thousand people were carted over by all the local fishermen in the span of thirty minutes to participate in a stations of the cross walk that lasted three hours and took all three thousand of us on a four mile hike through the jungle for all fifteen stations. It was pretty cool, unfortunately I needed to go the bathroom the entire time and therefore was somewhat distracted. It’s cool. After returning from the stations and getting a chance to use the facilities my day got better. We had a nice simple Good Friday service in the church and got to watch the Passion of the Christ with the Salesian sisters and their band of girls that live with them.
Holy Saturday was a bizarre combination of exciting, dull, depressing, and happy, in that order. When I woke up and had breakfast Padre Nilson asked me if I wanted to go see some of the waterfalls that day. I couldn’t help but reply with a yes. Padre Gennaro wanted to go see them and so the three of us piled into the small six person boat the Salesians have. What followed was a wild ride up the rapids of the upper Rio Negro to see a series of waterfalls about ten or twenty feet high, pretty sweet, pretty sweet. Padre Nilson asked me if I was familiar with roller coasters and I said “are you kidding, I love them” he then responded by telling me that what we were about to go through was the Amazon’s version of a roller coaster. It was. I have never really been on a river rafting excursion, my first one being in the Amazon I’d say is a win.
Then things got boring. And I mean boring. Holy Saturday has always been a day I never knew what to do with. This time, however, there was nothing to do. The boys were practicing for the Easter vigil all day, the priests were hearing confessions and nothing was on TV all day. I had nothing to do and my good friend emotion came back to haunt me. Homesickness can be a killer during holidays and events celebrated for the first time away from home. I learned this celebrating my seventeenth birthday in Poland. Easter is my favorite church celebration every year. My home parish goes crazy with the triduum and makes a very fun, very big deal out of all of it. I love it. I look forward to it every year. This year I could not attend there. And the homesickness plus the loneliness plus the lack of things to do weighed heavily. All I could think about all day was how I wanted to talk with my superiors and get transferred, nothing else mattered. It was a very difficult day. Fifteen minutes before the start of mass I had to go off by myself and vent all of my feelings before being able to participate.
The vigil mass, as in any country, was gorgeous and spectacular. It was definitely cool to see how Brazilians celebrate Easter, especially out here in the jungle. And as with any Easter celebration, my heart could not help but be lifted. I prayed all through mass asking the Lord to let me rise out of this depression and live a new life with Him. He never leaves a needed prayer unanswered. After mass it was like something changed, but nothing really had. In Iauareté it is not uncommon for the giving of a sign of peace to come at the end of mass instead of after the Our Father. With so many people attending the vigil it only made sense to save it for the end. I was surrounded by well wishers. I don’t think I’m off to say that more than a hundred people came up to me with huge smiles on their faces and gave me hugs wishing “feliz Pascoa!” (happy Easter).
After the vigil mass we went over to the Sisters’ house for a midnight dinner. There the sisters had prepared a nice amount of food for us and we brought a cake being that Easter Sunday this year just happened to be Irmã Lourdes’ birthday. So we had a great time celebrating the resurrection of Our Lord. There are six middle school aged girls that live with the Sisters and I get the impression they all think I’m the man, so to say. I first got this impression by the fact that when I entered the house they all ran up to me and gave me hugs wishing me happy Easter. It’s just that kind of moment you look for on mission; when you’re feeling low and suddenly the people you work to help show their appreciation in a sudden and happy way. I remember thinking at that moment: Ok, I don’t know what I’m doing here, and the stuff I do know that I’m doing I don’t like very much, but, I have to figure out a way to stay. I have to make myself like this.
The next day was Easter Sunday and I decided to enjoy it, no matter what. The Easter vigil had come and gone, there was nothing homesickness was going to do at this point. So at eight o’clock in the morning I found myself at one end of town with all the men and a statue of Our Risen Lord processing through the city to meet the procession of women coming from the other side of town carrying a statue of the Blessed Virgin. The two groups met at the basketball court beside the church where we had Easter Sunday mass, outside in the sun; a big, bright, beautiful celebration with all the decorations and banners having been made by the village and large palm tree branches lining the basket ball court. Afterwards everybody went home to prepare for the afternoon celebrations. Franciclei and I did some stuff to get the church ready for the Easter festival.
At two o’clock the party started. Iauareté is divided into various major communities of three hundred people or so. At the start of the festival each of the major nine communities dressed up in their community colors and began a march from their community centers to the basketball court. Nine communities all parading in nine different colors, carrying banners of their patron saints, food that represented their livelihood and musical instruments, I was so happy I thought to have my camera with me, less so when the battery died midway through. But that is the way of things.
The main event of the day was a dancing contest. Each community had a dance of tribal origin that it had practiced and presented at the festival. There were three judges for the contest; Padre Gennaro, one of the teachers at the school, and, somehow, myself. The dances were interesting patterned dances to the tune of panpipes which were participated in equal parts by the men and women. Each dance was different and each community dressed their dancers differently. It was hard to judge (mostly because I had very little idea what I was actually judging, but flexibility is part of the job, right?) but it certainly was fun to watch.
In between the dancing events we had an archery contest; homemade bows and arrows, with each community being represented by a single archer. It was fun to see each community really get into the whole contest thing with both the dancing and the archery, cheering on their guys, and not so much cheering on the other guys.
After the dancing and archery we had a food tasting time. I got to try various different kinds of food from the communities, mostly fish dishes as the river is the main source of food, but there were other kinds of tasty fruits and baked goods as well. All in all it was a good day and everybody went home happy, myself included.
Basically that brings to now. I set out for Brazil nearly three months ago hoping to help the Lord change hearts, I find that the heart that’s changed the most is my own. I no longer wake up in the morning feeling like I don’t belong, I wake up wanting to belong. I no longer look at the city as a place filled with people who can’t communicate with me, I see a whole bunch of stories I don’t know. I go running in the morning a lot these days, not for weight loss (though that is a noble cause considering how much oil is in the food I eat and that little weight I gained being unemployed for a time), I go running to see who I’ll bump into. If somebody wants to talk I talk with them. I learn things, I hear stories. I plan my painting class now and, guess what, I’m actually excited about it, who knew?
I have a little friend group forming. And by little friend group I mean little. I have a whole bunch of five to ten year old kids who love to come up to me and get a high five. Meus pequininos (my little ones). They love American football. I swear bringing an American football to the middle of Brazil was the best icebreaker ever. The kids love it, and they’re good at it too. I love throwing it around with them, breaking up piles of kids all diving for a fumble, or punting the ball just to watch them run away from it when it comes screaming back down. And it all started with Paula, a little ten year old girl who wasn’t afraid to ask to play with me.
I was in my emotional time before Easter, not sure how to exist here or what to do and I found myself watching a basketball game in the court by the church. I am not one for basketball, despite my height, but it just gave me something to do. I had been carrying the football for no particular reason and was holding it in my hands, spinning it around when I heard a small voice behind me say “José.” I turned around but didn’t see anybody and went back to watching the game. Again I heard a small voice “José” I looked again but saw nobody. I continued hearing the voice until I finally went looking. By one of the pillars behind a group of people was this little girl, the one who had been calling my name. She looked at me and said “Eu posso jogar a futebol Americano?” (can I throw the football?) I nodded. And she ran off. I was a little confused for a second until she came back with three of her friends and the four of us started throwing the ball.
I threw the ball with them for off and on an hour. After it was done I went back up to my room when it dawned on me, there was no way she would have been able to throw this ball without me being here. Most people here have never even seen an American football, much less held one. Without me those kids never would have thrown it. It’s a small, relatively insignificant thing, but isn’t that how all things start? I am learning the hard way that you don’t have to do big things in order to make difference.
I am still learning why I’m here, but that’s part of the process, a process I am now comfortable with embracing. It’s about the only thing I’m comfortable with. My comfort zone has been left far behind at this point. I am still humbled by my language skills, I am still in the habit of making minor social gaffes each day, I still have my boring moments, and I still feel clumsy with life here. But I smile, it’s starting to all be worth it, and it’s becoming an interesting adventure. It’s becoming a bit of a game, the people watch me and learn what I’m like and I watch them and learn what their like.
Just this morning was a slightly embarrassing but laughable moment. When I go out walking eyes follow me. It’s natural, I’m the first American to set foot in this community as a resident, and it makes sense that they’d pay some attention to me. It’s not a big deal to me being a full head taller than anybody else in the city (though I feel like a helicopter at mass) and I’ve gotten used to the stares. Well, sometimes it can lead to a bit of awkwardness when I went out walking this morning and walked into one of the local stores, the owner came up to me and said “good morning Joe, are you just out walking?” and I replied “actually, no. I need something.” And I reached up to the shelf and pulled down a four pack of toilet paper. That got a laugh. Its things like that which bring people closer together, you know?
When I titled this piece of writing I did so in irony. It always seemed impossible for me to make any sort of big difference just being one person. I’ve always felt that I needed to be more than just one person, more than just a volunteer, or a catholic, or whatever. I felt that I needed to be somebody cool, like Don Bosco, St. Francis of Assisi, Captain Hammer, Batman, Kermit the Frog, or anybody else cool who makes a difference. The irony there is that each of them is an individual too. Each of them is just one person. They all live their own lives. It was always hard for me to accept that just being me reaches out to people. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a combination of Batman, Don Bosco and Kermit the Frog? That’s like being one step down from Jesus. Being a painter and small time football coach doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. But I am learning to be fine with being me and seeing where that goes. I like me, I’ve worked hard to like me, and I think that Iauareté likes me too.
I don’t think the Good Samaritan had any noble deeds in mind when gassed up the donkey and decided to go for a ride. He just happened to find himself at the right place at the right time. I think I’m in the right place, and this seems like it could be the right time. Our Samaritan didn’t set out to be a doctor to some poor guy on the road side, that’s just where he ended up. He didn’t prepare for it anymore than to put his shirt on and get on his donkey. Just one person with a compassionate heart. I just have to keep my eyes on others, not down the road to where I’m going. That road keeps going, it never ends, it’s not worth putting all my focus into it. I need to learn to stop and help that poor broken guy on the side of the road.
It’s worth it. That guy’s worth it. Who knows where one good deed goes? Who knows where throwing the football can take a kid? Who knows what one painting class will inspire? It’s what I can give right now. I don’t know what the future’s going to look like, it’s too far away. So let’s try to look at the side of the road. There could be just one person who may change everything.
Joe Czupinski
