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Date Posted: 20:28:23 06/13/02 Thu
Author: Anonymous
Subject: Hands, A Dance of Kindness: A Story

Hands, A Dance of Kindness

"Once when I moved to a remote town, the power went off during a winter storm. By candlelight I turned pages of a magazine showing Christmas scenes. I closed the magazine and realized what I wanted for Christmas was a friend to share the spirit of it. I sent out a long prayer by candlelight in the storm and went to sleep.

The next day, 28 miles away where I worked, I started a friendly conversation with a woman in a nearby department. She too was travelling all of that way from the same remote town. We began carpooling. We usually said prayers together on our long drives. She confided in me she'd prayed for someone like me in her life.

Our friendship began in quiet and leisurely times. Long, enriching talks, juice and children, shared prayers and a deep friendship warmed and lit our moments. Life was perfect. Had we had more money, and lived in more complex homes in more crowded places, had we not been in a position to enjoy the simplest and loveliest things in a place most people reverently called, "God's country," we would have been poorer. A family vacation to see tourist sights, a cruise, days sunning on the beach, all would have dimished the loveliness of picnic lunches with birds singing and children's messy faces, and Sunday mornings together in church.

Somehow, following that time, one tragedy after the other befell our famillies. A close friend's husband was killed in a terrible accident. Her second child was born with autism. Troubles in our marriages unsettled our steady and peaceful world, unlikely dramas unfolded we never imagined we would have to deal with. Her marriage survived, mine didn't. She even moved far away to become a missionary, her dreams shattered by a corrupt mission that only strove to use her. She returned.

Her voice always seemed to find wisdom for me, and mine for her. Our lives were like a pilgrimage undertaken separately, but together. By the time 9/11 occured, I was far from home on my own pilgrimage to fight personal oppression - stalking and harrassment - from my former spouse. We rarely spoke or got together. When we did, often I would be stalked there.

I have asked myself many times how the divine would have permitted the events of 9/11 or the unlikely events that disrupted our lives in such unexpected ways. I have often marvelled at the extraodinary heroicism of the rescuers and helpers who came and offered strength and mercy in their hands to strangers suffering unwittingly in the horrible tragedy of 9/11. They were the hands that happened to be at hand.

Some of us will live out our lives without the opportunity to be heroes, or so we might think. We may not recognize the little ways in which we can be heroes to those whom our lives touch. When personal tragedies ruffle our lives unexpectedly, after we have dusted ourselves off, we look back and see that there was a fire that needed tending, in which we played a part. Helping hands are mutual, they connect, they uplift and pull each other to a standing position, they join and survive together.

So then, the question of "why me?" or "why them?" becomes in action, "why not me, why not them." When you wonder why the divine does not give you a life of prosaic and perfect ease, look beside you and you will see either someone who needs your hand to pull them up. Or if you look up, perhaps to seek the divine, you might find in its place a hand reaching out to you, to pull you up. Then you will see that you have found the divine, an a very imperfect world, there in the fire, paradise, the one you thought was lost forever.

If you find your hands throughout your life connected in acts of lifting up and being uplifted, consider yourself as having been richly blessed. You will find yourself on both sides of the continuum at one time or another. Never reject an opportunity to be the lifter or the uplifted. When hands connect, both aspects are fulfilled equally, mutually, they become one and the same."

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