“Here is a simple rule-of-thumb guide for behaviour. Ask yourself what you want people to do for you, then grab the initiative and do it for them. Add up God’s Law and Prophets and this is what you get.”
Matthew 7:12 [MSG]
New Year’s Eve has come and gone. We chose, albeit unwillingly, an unique way to ring in 2020 and the new decade by spending the 24 hours from the afternoon of December 31st to the following afternoon in the Emergency Department of a large city hospital. But that’s not why I will never forget this New Year’s. I will never forget it because of what I learned.
Despite the fact that it was probably one of the busiest nights of the year for the Emergency Department, and we were their least critical case, the staff were unfailingly thoughtful and kind to us throughout the entire 24 hours. From moving us to the quietest part of the Department so that my husband might be able to get some sleep, to providing both of us with heated blankets, they did everything in their power to make our stay with them as pleasant as it could possible be. And I learned something from this.
It is so often those little things that we take for granted, those thing that we neglect to do for someone else, that in the end up make all the difference. Too often I know I feel that in order to make a difference in someone’s life it is necessary to make the big sacrifice, to do something really special for them. Yet those smiles from the staff as they passed by, along with the question,”Is there anything we can get you?”, meant the world to us.
All too often I hear someone use the phrase, ‘I would like to help but I don’t have the resources, the money, the time, the health [your choice] to do anything about it’. But New Year’s Eve 2020 impressed upon me that is so often is those little things that really make the difference. And the good thing about that, is that for the most part they don’t cost us anything except compassion!
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