Day 23i: Camping with Compassion … (05/07/2019)
Pondering the slogan that had been molded onto the water bottle Rachel had just provided me (“As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the Heart.”), I take a looooooong walk uphill through the town of Kerzers to a ridiculously tiny Catholic church (that was unfortunately quite-untypically closed) and then a just as looooooong walk back down into town to try and find a place to spend that night. Kerzers provided no takers on this day (no readily apparent Givers, actually), however, and so I simply did what I always do when rebuffed or rejected or even ridiculed — I shrugged my shoulders, I smiled, and then I sauntered on to the next town.
As it turned out, Agriswil was only a few miles away, and I entered this cute little village a short time thereafter — a village that was so small that it contained neither a church nor a bank foyer nor even a town hall where I might lay my head for the night. What it DID provide, though, was a small wooden hut that served as a bus stop for local children on schooldays. I sat therein and rested for awhile and then tried to hunker down for the night as dusk began to settle in, and yet an unpleasant mist soon arrived and a disquieting coldness rapidly set in with it. Sleeping very soon proved to be untenable, and I was debating whether or not to simply start walking again and hobble through the night (better to be on the move, no matter how slowly, than simply sit in the darkness with chattering teeth and shivering knees) when lights were seen in a nearby farmhouse. I knocked on the door and briefly described my Mission to the woman who answered the door; a woman who was understandably afraid of the tall scruffy stranger looming at her door and who thus refused to help the same, and yet her mother had overheard our conversation from the balcony above and then came down to graciously offer me a sleeping bag, a warm blanket, and a loaf of freshly homebaked bread for the night … :O 😀
It wasn’t the soundest of sleeps, to be sure, and yet her Kindness provided more than enough sustenance & warmth to see me through the shadows and carry me to the following morn … 🙂
“Courage, Kindness, and Service; these are the qualities that redefine & indeed re-establish us as Human Beings, and as such are the qualities that propel us, even if but on occasion, to our truest evincing of greatness.” ~ inspired by R.J. Palacio
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