There are times I've been very emotional and other times when I feel like I've gone through so much I've lost the ability to feel. There are times when I know I ought to be concerned about the way things are, but have become so numb that I wonder if I've forgotten how.

When that happens, something usually manages to sneak through my defenses and I get reconnected with my emotions. This time it's something my cousin sent me. It was part of a collection of sappily sentimental anecdotes. The last one brought tears to my eyes.

quote:

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A little boy about 10 years old was standing before a shoe store on the roadway, barefooted, peering through the window, and shivering with cold.

A lady approached the boy and said, "My little fellow, why are you looking so earnestly in that window?"

"I was asking God to give me a pair of shoes," was the boy's reply.

The lady took him by the hand and went into the store and asked the clerk to get half a dozen pairs of socks for the boy. She then asked if he could give her a basin of water and a towel. He quickly brought them to her.

She took the little fellow to the back part of the store and, removing her gloves, knelt down, washed his little feet, and dried them with a towel. By this time the clerk had returned with the socks. Placing a pair upon the boy's feet, she purchased him a pair of shoes.

She tied up the remaining pairs of socks and gave them to him. She patted him on the head and said, "No doubt, my little fellow, you feel more comfortable now?"

As she turned to go, the astonished lad caught her by the hand, and looking up in her face, with tears his eyes, answered the question with these words: "Are you God's Wife?"

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It may not strike you as profoundly as it did me, but that's the way life is. Sometimes the things happening in our own lives have a great deal more significance to us than to others. Your own profound experience may seem of no consequence to me, and vice versa. The same goes for disasters. One person may suffer from something that seems of no consequence to another.

We sometimes have bitter arguments over things of very little consequence (example: "the Defiant is 18 inches long! I saw a picture of the model!"). Sometimes it's about things of wider interest, such as recent reports in the news about gun violence, airline crashes, or the possibility (or reality) of war.

We all want the world to be perfect, but each of us has a different vision of perfection. Let's remember to respect one another's vision of perfection even when we disagree or think it's stupid or inconsequential. The fact that you are willing to examine someone else's opinion without immediately telling them that they are stupid, mislead, or ill-informed lets them know something very important. It tells them that you believe that what they think is important enough to be heard, whether it is right or wrong. That they are important.

In an imperfect world, that does more to bring about perfection than almost anything else I can think of.

--Baloo

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"Lassie, her ears pricked up!"
--Atoth the Tamarian [From "Star Trek: Door Repair Guy"]
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