I had a wonderful conversation with a priestly friend last night. It was lovely... but it really got me thinking. More often than not, I think I forget about this whole interconnected weird circle of relationships that happened when God created only one man and one woman. It got me thinking of just how true a passage like Gal 3:28 "there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, woman nor man for you are all one in Jesus Christ" really is.
Truth be told, I think we are closer than what we first guess.
In my senior year of high school, in a small country high school, it was the first week of classes when three students in my year junior (my sister's grade eleven class) were driving back to their home in Gibbons. The driver of the small car made a left hand turn at the intersection of Hwy 28A and 37. Her call in judgement was ever so slightly a few seconds delayed and the vehicle was propelled right through the intersection on the front of semi trailer truck. The student in the back seat was thrown almost 20yards into the ditch and the other gal was taken to hospital, but died in route. As per "Murphy's Law" the driver walked away without any broken bones or internal damage and just had a few scars to serve as a physical reminder of what she had done that afternoon.
It was a horrible start to the year. The one family wouldn't even let the driver of the car into the church for the funeral. They let hardly any students into the building while the other family held a memorial in the junior high school gym and buses upon buses of students filed in.
I guess me - being the person that I am - I couldn't handle to still see the hurt and pain when the joys of Christmas rolled around and I couldn't listen to one more complaint about weird counsellors walking the halls, "just checking in"... so, I did something about it.
I started with the staff - over 70 staff members, but I wanted to try it on them first. I printed out fist sized cartoon frogs with googly eyes and speckles, coloured each one, and attached a little cut out message that read something like: "You've been F.R.O.G.G.E.D! Thank you for being the person who has allowed me to Fully Rely On Great Guidance Every Day... you have made a difference in making my day just a little better, hopefully this will brighten your day." Or something really corny and goofy. Explaining my plan to one of the guidance counsellors, she agreed to meet me at the school at 7am the next morning. Getting up at 6, throwing on some clothes and throwing my books together, I drive through the snow to arrive at school 90min before I had to be there. We got in and stuffed each one of these frogs into every staff mailbox in the office. That was it... now I just had to sit and wait.
Some teachers laughed, others didn't react at all. Some got teary eyed and others showed their homerooms... that was all I needed... if I could get one positive reaction from the student population - get one smile out of 300 kids, that was all I needed to make it worth the time it would take. So, the same thing... this time, over 300 little frogs and messages were separated into envelops and handed out to all the homeroom teachers to pass out to their students.
It worked... student population had a slight increase in their moral... some put them up in their lockers and made me laugh when I walked by, others would tell their friends that it was at home on their fridge or mirror. Sure, some showed up in the garbage or on the school grounds, but it helped one student, and that's all that mattered.
Playing dectective is fun although I have to rule out one more suspect and the secret friend has buzzed again - this time, creating a hotmail account called "littlebuzzzz" to email me from. They have really thought this through. That, and I have now heard from more than one reliable source that when someone shared my exciting news with other people, she "lost it"... from what I would assume is the same relief that I have.
The point of the story is that sometimes we never know how we touch the lives of those around us. The only thing that we can be certain of is that each person we meet, speak to, or interact with... we will impact their lives somehow - the question is how. Will they look back and regret the time that they spent with us, the time they met us, or even the time spent trying to avoid us?
I guess it's something that I'll never know... just how interconnected we all are.
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