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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (29597)	6/20/1999 6:49:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

Well, I'd like to offer this as an equally neat inspirational story for the day- as my husband starts the grill and I pretend I'm in the kitchen making salad. We have a wonderful assistant minister in our church; she is widowed, and I guess about 60?, and one of the strongest, kindest, most beautiful women I've ever met. Today she told a story- to which I probably can't do justice, but which had us passing a napkin around in the choir, wiping the tears off our hymnals. It was a true story.. and I guess what I loved about it, is that it's not a "religious" story; it spoke to me despite my wavering faith, my usual agnosticism. I read the arguing going on at Feelies and wonder at the division, the rancor that sets in so quickly when religion enters the equation as if morality and tolerance and atheism and Christianity were all somehow mutually exclusive. Jo's story: There was a single mother who had several children. She tried hard to raise them alone, but had problems that resulted in the children winding up temporarily in foster care. She managed to get back on her feet and reunite the family when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the few months she had left to live she was able to place the younger children with families, but not the eleven year old boy. In desperation, she called a couple who had lived next door to the foster family where he'd been living and told the husband the situation- that she was dying, that the DSS would be picking the boy up that day to place him in a group home, and that her son had remembered them as being "nice" to him, and was there any way, any way, they could offer him a place to live. Jo knew it was a true story because it was Jo's husband the woman called and who turned to Jo and said, "What do you want to do?" She said, "We can't let him go to a group home." And he said to the mother, "We'll be right there." They took the boy to see his mother in the hospital a few weeks later and as they left, she said to them, "Please help him become a good man." And Jo said to us this morning, "That was 31 years ago, and he IS a good, good man, and our son." Her point was that there are many ways to give, to make things better, to help someone, to affect a life. And that we need to be ready to say "I'll be right there." Her husband died two years ago; he must have been a wonderful man. I'm going on a women's retreat this weekend and she will be there, and I'm so hoping I'll get the chance to know her better.