Help

 Travel today/yesterday presented many opportunities to care for those around us.  While we were on BART a woman made an impassioned plea for monetary help.  Usually I will give in those moments, but the only currency I was carrying was Euros… not very helpful. I did think about talking with her about sources of help, but she was at the other end of the train and I was trapped by our carry-ons from getting up to help. Undoubtedly those are both poor excuses, and I find myself reflecting on that today. Then later, a man was trying to pick up a woman on the BART train.  She was clearly uncomfortable with it, and he kept pushing: kept inviting her to leave her plans and go do something with him. At one point I considered stepping in to help, though she seemed to handle it on her own.  Sometimes in situations like that I wonder if it is more helpful or disempowering for others to step in.  Does it take away her sense of self-agency if someone needs to rescue her?  Or does it help her to feel supported?  Sometimes I honestly don’t know. Then at the airport in London, I was standing near an elevator and heard a woman inside yelling for help.  She was crying and saying, “please help me!”  I pushed the elevator button and found her alone in the elevator, huddled down in the corner.  I asked her if she needed help but she stood up, ran out of the elevator and up the escalator nearby, crying the whole time.  Then today we were on the bus to go around the island of Mull on our way to catching the second ferry to get to Iona (complicated, I know), when the bus driver made the decision to stop and ask a young man walking the road if he wanted a ride as well.  He said he did.  He ended up sitting across the isle from us and so we started talking.  He said that he and a friend have been traveling the Scottish highlands with absolutely nothing but what they can carry.  No food, no money, no phones. Interesting.  We gave him 10 pounds, not because he asked for it (he didn’t), but because it seemed the right thing to do. Interestingly, this opened the door to conversation and it turns out he is studying to be a Jesuit priest and part of what their class is doing is spending time seeing if they can live on the kindness of strangers. It led into further and deeper conversation when I shared that I was actually a Presbyterian pastor.  And I found myself deeply grateful that this time the kindness came back to me in such an amazing way.

Still, this all felt like a LOT.  Why were there so many opportunities to help others?  Why were there so many people in need in the airports and BART trains and buses?  Is it that there are more people in need these days?  Is it that I’m more aware of it now?  I feel like humans are becoming more and more isolated from one another, and frankly more callous in our response to the needs of others. Maybe this is even more the case because it seems the needs around us are growing exponentially and we feel overwhelmed by the amount of help required. But all of these people are FAMILY: they are all siblings to us, all valuable as part of the human family, as part of creation.  And I do believe we have a responsibility to help one another, to support one another, to connect to one another, despite the growing distance of people around us.  We are called to choose something different, to remember our connections and our responsibility to care for one another.  So I will be keeping my eyes open, and trying in each moment to choose kindness, compassion and help.

On the other side of this, today (our third travel day) we, too, ended up relying on the kindness of strangers.  We walked from our hotel in Glasgow to the train station, took the train to Oban, where we caught the ferry to Mull, as I mentioned above.  But everything was running late.  The train kept needing to stop, the ferry started late, the bus across Mull ran into some problems on the road.  Our second ferry, then, the one that took us to Iona was supposed to run at 6:15: the last ferry crossing of the day.  But at every step of the way others were kind, and others waited.  The bus across Mull did not leave at the time it was scheduled to do so because the ferry from Oban had not arrived.  The ferry to Iona did not leave because the bus around Mull had not arrived.  It waited over a half hour.  There weren’t very many of us, maybe a dozen, who were crossing to Iona.  And I know that in all these cases the drivers, the crew on the boat… that all were late ending their day because they were helping strangers. But they did it anyway, for the few of us traveling this way.  And while it caused a bit of inconvenience for them, for us it was a great gift.  We made it here, we are settled in now to our little room where we will be for the next 3 nights, we are happy and content and for myself I feel a bit more hopeful about the kindness possible from humanity.  

Kindness makes a difference.  Every time.