None Braver than a Lifesaver

"Wait, does he mean atherosclerosis?"

My name isn't Clemin Thyme.

Samuel Clemens, who published using the name Mark Twain, has a famous saying in which he claims that too much of anything is bad, but I never believed that a person can be too honest. I always thought that people who claimed to be too honest were in fact trying to justify their own lack of social tact and grace.

I've always been known as an honest person. As far back as my elementary school days, there were people who called me "Honest Abe," including the PE teacher who once had me help umpire the baseball games. And yes, in case you were wondering, my name is actually Abraham (spelled with I's in place of the first and last A's).

Anyone can claim to be an honest person. How do we discern the liars from the truthful ones? Real honest people become known for their honesty in a community, and their word holds a lot more weight than the average person. But what about words on a page, especially those written by someone not even using his real name?

In order for our eyes to see anything, they need light, and in order for the heart to discern, it also needs light. From whence does this light come? My contention is that it is inherent inside every human heart, and we need only to soften and purify our hearts in order to let the light shine. Sure, some have willfully chosen to extinguish this light and live a hedonistic life, not caring about anything that happens to any being other than themselves. They could literally immerse themselves in flames and still there would be none of this light emanating from them, the light that truly matters.

Let me tell you about a time when my grandmother let her heart's light shine. I went to visit her as she was approaching her 90th birthday. She wanted to give me some money, but I didn't want to take any. She said, "for the poor!" and I obliged. She handed me two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. From that moment, every person who I saw and determined to the best of my ability to be truly in need of the money and of sound enough mind not to waste it received at least one twenty-dollar bill from my grandma.

The encounters were heart-wrenching. There were young men asking for food or just a dollar outside of grocery stores. There was a man on Thanksgiving who looked so overjoyed upon receiving a loaf of bread that I felt compelled to give him one of the twenty-dollar bills, just hoping that he wouldn't waste it on alcohol, and as I left him there on the street with nothing more than a loaf of bread and a twenty-dollar bill (why couldn't I have done more?) he said to me, his voice full of genuine emotion and gratitude: "God is good, all the time!"

Anytime you do something to lift someone else's burden, I encourage everyone reading this to believe that a burden will in turn be lifted from you someday.

When you see someone in need, I encourage you to help that person if you can, and if you don't see anyone in need, I encourage you to look for those people and help them. Doing so makes your heart shine with the light of your good deeds and your kind compassion for your fellow human beings.

I'll leave you with one last anecdote, this one about a man in a town called Bozeman, Montana who brought a homeless lady and her dog to a hostel and kindly paid for her accommodation before quietly leaving. I saw the entire exchange from where I was sitting; he asked for no details and his manners were immaculate. As he was leaving, I felt glad that I had my mask on because I couldn't help positively beaming at this man and the great and heavy deed he had just done. He left into the night with steps as light as feathers, and his eyes were full of light.

Home is where the heart is.

The heart is in the chest.

Can't live in a rib cage.

It makes no sense!