After hearing a friend telling a story about her husband taking their dog for a walk and coming across a man having a heart attack on the bathroom floor at a park and spending half an hour trying to do CPR on him, I’ve been thinking about the story of the “Good Samaritan”.
Random I know… but please stick with me ☺
I do have a point!
For those of you who don’t know, or need a refresher… it’s a story about a man who is walking along a street, and he gets mugged and beaten up. He’s left bleeding and bloody by the side of the road, and people just walk by. All the people that you would expect would help….
Until one particular man walked by…. And he’s NOT the person that you would expect would help. He walked by on the opposite side of the road, saw the guy, and stopped to help. He crossed the road. He lifted him up, took him to a place where he could clean him up, paid for him to be cared for there until he was well, and made sure he was safe before leaving – asking nothing in return….
Other than the obvious, the cool thing about the story is that the beaten up guy on the road and the man who actually stopped were from completely different walks of life. Different ‘tribes’…
For example, lets say beaten up guy was Jewish and good guy man was German. Now you can see why it was a big deal for this particular man to help the beaten up guy. Or beaten up guy was poor and ‘lower class’, while good guy man was wealthy and of noble breed, used to being served instead of serving.
In said friend’s story, beaten up guy was a man having a heart attack on a bathroom floor in a park, and good guy man was her husband…
There’s not a lot of people these days who will STOP, and ‘cross the road’, and purposefully choose to extend themselves for the sole goal of helping someone else better themselves….
Crossing the road is symbolic… you choose to go out of your way. You have to dodge traffic. Sometimes it’s a risk for you and your own personal safety. You choose to make an effort. You choose that it’s worth the lost time, and the energy, to extend your hand and reach out to someone else.
Reaching out and cleaning someone else off and lifting them up is symbolic… it’s hard work, it’s dirty, it can get intense… sometimes people don’t want the help, or don’t even know they need it… But the good guy knows they need it, and quietly keeps extending themselves in any way they can until the beaten up guy is well….
You get my point right.
Let’s continue to make good choices… to honour those that have helped us at some point… to be encouraging wherever we can… to be gracious to those around us in different stages of their journeys… to be the best that we can possibly be, because of the sacrifice someone has made for us…
Let’s also extend ourselves, and cross the road when we should…
.the.world.is.your.oyster. 