As helpful as these writing prompts can be, one issue I have is that they occasionally present situations that require retrieval from the memory banks, which in this particular instance has thus far resulted in no examples of faith being restored by a stranger. I’ve seen plenty of them on YouTube, though I’m not sure how many are staged or just AI. Nothing from real life is coming to mind at the moment, beyond someone holding a door and offering a kind word.
Despite getting our daily overdose of reminders of people’s capacity for behaving poorly– often our leaders– I realize that kindness and bravery and other virtuous behavior are by no means in short supply. In general, I still have faith in humanity, just not in some among the current batch of elected humanity– if “humanity” is the right word– holding office in this country and other places around the world.
Wait! I just thought of someone we met a week or so ago. My wife and I were visiting a working farm that’s also a tourist attraction in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area and we happened to run into the fourth generation farmer who helps run the place.
He gave us a ride around the property, showed us what they were doing, told us what they had plans to do, and was proud of what they had accomplished thus far. He might be one of the world’s greatest salesmen, but it felt like a serendipitous moment, from our perspective, since we were wandering around, I wasn’t sure where we should be walking, and this man out of the blue offers us a tour, takes maybe a half-hour out of his still-busy day to give us the lay of the land.
I remember thinking that I’ve seen this kind of down-to-earth, unabashed, unprovoked kindness somewhere else, and it was from another farmer closer to home.
Anyway, there are people around who are so comfortable in their own skin that their “genuineness” just pours out of them. They don’t know any other way to be, and it feels good to be in their presence, gives one hope, sets an example.
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