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I heard him come into the office. Janet, our Office Manager, greeted him. Their voices drifted through my door. My instincts told me that I was about to go to our new Wiegels and buy this man some gas.
Janet stuck her head in my office, “Can you see someone?” She is so professional. Of course, I could see someone. He came in and sat down to talk. He told me that he lives off Papermill, and works up near Strawberry Plains. His mother is in a nursing home in Rockwood with Alzheimer's.
Today is his day to visit her. Gas prices are so high. His job does not pay that much. He has a hard time getting back and forth to work. He would like to find something closer to home that pays better. He needs some gas so that he can go visit his mother who has Alzheimer’s in the nursing home in Rockwood.
I tell him to meet me at the Wiegels. We get there and wait for him to stop at a pump before I get out of the truck. He does not stop, but winds his way through the lines of pumps coming out the other end with an exasperated look on his face. Wiegels has no gas.
We go to Food City. There is gas there. I tell him we can help him with $25.00 worth of gas. We use to fill people up when they stopped by needing gas, but that was before someone driving an Expedition stopped in for help and prices got so high. He seems happy with what we can do and pumps his gas. “Thank you for the gas. Sorry, but I went over ten cents.”
He is back in his car on his way to see his mother in the nursing home in Rockwood with Alzheimer’s. Will she know him when he gets there? I don’t imagine that he will tell her that he had to stop at a church to get the gas to make the trip.
Thinking about him after he is gone, I wonder about his story. Is his mother really in a nursing home in Rockwood with Alzheimer’s? Is he really going to see her? What does it feel like to walk into a church office and ask for help? I can’t imagine that it is a good feeling. Maybe the feeling gets better when it becomes evident that some help is available, even if it is just a little.
Inevitably, my thoughts move toward gratitude. I have a mother in Rockwood as well. She is not in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. I have not experienced the desperation of needing to ask someone in a church office for gas money to go see her. Mom comes to Knoxville more than I go to Rockwood. Mom still drives. There are many reasons for me to be grateful.
My mind starts to ask a different question. Did I need this man to stop by and ask for gas so that I could be reminded that I ought to be grateful? Well, evidently I did, because I don’t recall feeling especially grateful before he came into the office.
How easy it is to take life for granted. I think of my truck, my house, the meal I will eat this evening, the bed I will sleep in tonight. But there is more to life than those material items. There are moments. The moments when I look into another person’s eyes and really see that person. Those are moments when we really know that we are alive. There are those moments when we touch another. Maybe it is a handshake, maybe a hug, or even a fist bump; but in that moment, we feel the warmth of another human being as our lives connect. In moments like those, we are reminded that we are not living alone.
Life for many of us is but a short, short season. Thankfulness and gratitude free us to experience the great joys of life, found more often than not, in easily overlooked, unnoticed moments.
Joy and peace,
Ed
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