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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I have already eaten nachos twice this week and I hope to add another dose, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a story about making an impact in unexpected ways.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day is: Your tongue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end.
Friday Forum
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What I Learned Yesterday:
Unless this is your first episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday, you’re probably well aware that I spent nearly 19 years working at a local bookstore. When I first started with the company the store I worked at was about 12,000 square feet in size. About two years later we moved to a much larger location, that gave us a lot more space and opportunity. However, there were some nice things about the old smaller location.
After I’d been working there about a year I was promoted to oversee the Bibles and church supplies department. These items took up about two thirds of the back wall. We also imprinted names on Bibles, so I spent a lot of time at the imprinting machines. From my view at the imprinter, I could look down one of the two main aisles all the way to the front register and out through the front door.
The vantage point was great for me. I would often race to see if I could take a customer’s order, send them to the front of the store to pay for it, and have it ready to go before they could get back to the imprinting desk. I never told the customer about the race, it was just something I did to push myself to get better and more efficient.
There were other advantages to the view too. Since I could see all the way to the front of the store, I could see when the register was getting backed up, and go up to help out. I could also observe customers shopping up and down the aisle to see if any of them needed assistance.
One day I looked up and saw that help was needed at the front. I quickly headed up the main aisle with my mind focused on jumping in to assist the customers waiting to check out. However, as I got about 15 feet from the register area I got a weird feeling. It was that feeling that you get when you know that someone is staring at you. I knew where the look was coming from because I could seem them out of my peripheral vision. I immediately stopped and looked over at the person. What happened next is almost unbelieveable.
As I turned to look at who was staring at me I locked eyes with a woman with a look that I had never seen and I can’t quite explain. The look startled me. Her gaze was absolutely transfixed on me and she looked stunned, even mortified. I walked up to her and asked her if I could help her with anything. She apologized to me and told me that she was caught off guard.
She went on to tell me that I was the spitting image of her son. Quite unexpectedly she then told me that her son had been killed about a week prior. When she walked into the store and saw me coming down the aisle, she thought she had seen a ghost.
I don’t know how one could possibly ever prepare for a moment like that. I didn’t know what to say. I honestly don’t know what I said, in fact. I know that we talked about her son, what he was like, and the circumstances which ended his life. He was in a car accident while on his way to church.
I have no idea how long we stood there and talked. In some ways it seems like just a moment, and in other ways it seems like an eternity. When we were done I gave her a hug and told her she could come in and talk with me anytime she wanted. She did come in a few more times, believe it or not. She told me that talking with me helped her deal with her loss and ease her grief.
Last night we had a meeting at my church to talk about missions project. We are a tiny church, less than 30 people. While we recognize that we are limited in our resources, we also believe strongly that there is MUCH we can do.
By the time we left our house to attend the meeting, I had already planned on sharing the story about the grieving mom. However, as I sat there in the missions meeting, I realized that the story fit in nicely with the conversations we had at the meeting.
We talked about a lot of opportunities to serve people in our local community and around the world. We talked about helping to provide meals for the elderly and shut-in citizens of our city. We talked about helping to provide assistance with transportation to doctors appointments for the elderly. We even talked about taking flowers, socks, and blankets to those living in a nearby senior care facility.
We didn’t just talk about serving the elderly. We talked at length about how we could help international and domestic students at the local universities. Ideas included serving meals, taking them grocery shopping, and helping international students learn English.
We spent time talking about how we can partner with a nearby elementary school to help the teachers and students with supplies and with afterschool projects, and how we can help out with a ministry that rebuilds homes.
In addition to those things, we talked about opportunities that exist to help provide backpacks to an organization in Mexico, provide assistance to a missionary in Asia, and help bring clean drinking water to impoverished areas of Africa.
Some of these things are things that we won’t be able to do, but many of them are things that we will be able to assist with. Among the things that are already on our calendar are helping out at our regional food bank, and providing assistance to a ministry that serves lower income residents of several apartment complexes.
Here’s what I learned.
You may be wondering how all of these things tie together. They tie together because they all represent simple ways to make an impact.
Sometimes we will get blindsided by impact opportunities. Those are the opportunities that we don’t plan for or put on our calendar, but they show up in unexpected moments. We have no time to prepare and just have to respond the best way we can. As I look back on my time with the grieving mother, there are things that I wish I would have done differently, or things I would say to her that I was unable to say back then. But I can’t turn back the hands of time and change what I did.
However, even though I’m pretty sure I could handle the situation better if it happened to me today, I know for certain that I was a blessing and a benefit to her 20 years ago when it happened. And that is the point of today’s episode.
You can make an impact. You can make someone’s day better. You can make someone’s life better.
There are opportunities for impact ALL AROUND EACH ONE OF US! You don’t have to have money to serve or better someone’s life. It doesn’t take money to check out a book from the library and go read to the elderly who are unable to read for themselves any longer.
However, many impact opportunities do take money. That doesn’t mean that they take a lot of money. How could you bless someone if you skipped one soda or coffee per day, and saved that money for a month? That money could go a long way to helping someone less fortunate than you.
The truth is, we can make a profound impact on the world around us, but often times we simply fail to prepare for impact. News outlets all over the world are filled with story upon story of horrible and tragic things that we do to each other. If you’re tired of that stuff, then I can think of nothing better to do than to impact someone and make their world a better place.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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