The next right thing.

I believe that things happen for reasons that I cannot begin to even understand...I often find that there are times when I end up in a place that I had no intention of being at all, and yet, there I am....exactly in the moment that I am meant to be in.

Today, such a thing happened. We got up and went to church and then had many things that we needed to get accomplished....like, the kids needed pumpkins for youth group tonight, Dylan was starting to look like a mushroom so he needed a haircut. I needed breadcrumbs to make the baked asparagus tonight for dinner and I needed to get a flashdrive to start on a project for work. So off to town we went. We decided we could stop and get lunch at Panera Bread, but when we got there the line was almost out the door and since I kinda like to sit when I eat and there were no available tables we headed out to the most healthiest place of all...yep, you guessed it....McDonalds....I'm joking, I'm joking about the healthiest place, but that is where we ended up nonethelesswe. We parked the car and sitting at the table outside was a man....homeless, I presume, sitting all alone....with a look of just complete I have no one or nothing in this world......a very sad look. This broke my heart. Now, I dont know this mans story, why he has come to this point in his life....but you know what, I don't care. He is a fellow human being who inhabits this Earth with me. This is a man who is someones child, brother, and maybe at some point he even had a friend or a pet. At some point this man mattered to someone. I am not sure if loss of a job, a broken childhood, drugs or alcohol, or mental illness brought him to this place, but I do know that for today, he got to receive a kind word and a meal from a stranger. I walked over to this man and said hello. I asked him how he was and he smiled and said, "I am okay, ma'am. How are you?" I asked him what he was doing out here (meaning how did you get to this place in your life) and he simply smiled again and said, "just having a cup of coffee." I stood there for a minute.....he was a man who had nothing to smile at and yet he smiled. I asked this frail looking man, who was unkempt and clearly in dirty clothes, hair tattered, shoes worn if he had eaten today. He dropped his head and said, "yes, ma'am, I had a little something." I told him I didnt mean to offend him, but I would like to buy him something to eat if he were hungry. He didnt really say much....never really gave me a yes or a no answer. But I excused myself and went in and ordered my food and then an extra meal for this man I had just met. I took the food out to him. He smiled and said, "God Bless You" I know that I will probably never see this man again, I will never know his story, but I hope I made a difference in this man's life today. I hope that a kind word and a smile will warm his heart. And I hope that my son, Dylan, will learn compassion for others in watching his mom care for people she has never met. I hope that as he and I talked about what I did, that he will take that with him for life and that someday maybe he will have the courage to reach out to someone who is less fortunate than him. You see, today wasnt about making myself feel good...it was about doing the next right thing, it was about reaching out to others and teaching my child about love and compassion.
Now, when I started out today, McDonalds was the furtherest thing from my mind, but its funny how that is where I ended up....ended up exactly where I needed to be at that moment.