The downtrodden aren’t always homeless or poor or sick … Sometimes they are people just like you and me; people with normal lives and everyday challenges; people who are simply down and in need of some Kindness. A simple smile can be their ladder; a simple kind word may well be the only helping hand they need to climb back into the light …

These prisoners of despair are around you all the time; a few of them will even come close & cross your path this very day. And you will see them when they do — you will see them not as “ingrates” or “assholes”; not as “jerks” or “introverts”; not as “weirdos” or “losers”. No, now you have remembered that they, just like you, have pressing fears and unfulfillable desires; that they, like you, are Good People who have merely fallen in a hole from which they cannot rise without help.

You will see them today … They will cross your path.
Won’t you please reach out to them when they do?

“You should be nicer to him,’ a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. ‘He has no friends.’ This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still clearly remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

 

Filed under: Heeding the Homeless by Scaughdt