When I started contemplating this post, I couldn’t figure out the moral to the story. So I figured I’d forgo the memory altogether. But just as I finished cleaning off the counters and putting the leftovers in the fridge it hit me, so here it is…
…as I was cleaning up after Sunday dinner, I loaded the dishwasher and scrubbed out the sinks. When I picked up the drain stopper, I saw that there was soggy food in the drain that the stopper hadn’t caught. Yuck! And then she came to mind – a girl from my childhood/teenage years that shall remain nameless. Mainly because other than this one memory, I don’t have a lot of good things to say about her. She teased me unmercifully and though I didn’t let too much teasing get to me, the digs that she got in smarted. I often tell my girls that the reason kids tease is because they don’t feel good about themselves and they have to make you look bad in order to make themselves look better – and I do believe that was the case with this girl and I even realized it at the time. But I still remember the cutting remarks.
Then there was the day I happened to be on kitchen detail at church camp. I had brought the last clean load from the back of the dining hall and was putting them in their proper places then checking to make sure we were indeed finished. She had been washing pans at the sink up front. The pans were done and she had drained the water to find food in the drain. I remember standing there thinking, “Ewww! Gross!” and then I watched in amazement while she matter-of-factly scooped out the crud and transferred it to the trash. That one action in that fleeting moment suddenly made her my hero. I totally remember thinking, “I wished I was THAT kind of person. One who would do a task like that without gagging or worse, leave it in the sink for the next person to deal with.”
I dare say every time I clean food crud out of my sink now that I have a home of my own, that girl and that incident comes to mind and I remember feeling such awe.
And that leads me to the moral…we should ALL be able to find ONE thing that is good in EVERYONE!
