One of my best friends called tonight in a panic. She was on her way to run a Community Board meeting, and realized she’d left a pot of soup simmering on the stove.
“This is going to take time,” she warned. Her husband was out of town, deployed by the Red Cross to manage shelters for people left homeless by Hurricane Dorian. “I need you to come down to the Community Board, get my keys and go back to turn off the soup.”
Inconvenient. And yet sometimes it is not hard to figure out that God has designated you as the solution to someone else’s problem. This is a blessing. It is a gift; an hour out of my life to prevent a crisis is time I can easily hand over without irritation. It’s true I’d intended (in fact desperately needed) to do my laundry, but preventing a fire clearly trumped my plans. So I hopped onto the subway, sped five stops downtown, interrupted the Community Board meeting to retrieve my friend’s keys, caught a bus back uptown, walked a few blocks west, and turned off the stove.
All told it was a mere hour out of my life. That’s all the interruption amounted to: a willingness put down my personal priorities and to be open to God’s plan for my evening.
Yet the sum of it was so much more. It was more to my friend, more to her unscathed neighbors. For what might have happened if I hadn’t said yes? Sometimes the simple act of responding to others resonates in more ways than we expect.
When that happens, I think the appropriate thing to say is “Thank you. Thank you for choosing me, trusting me, using me.”
After all, the Lord could have chosen someone else.
