A Moment of Sanity

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, I would like to relate my own contribution to the fight against mass insanity. This is a true telling of an encounter that took place on Monday. It is not meant to be self serving, as I hope you will discover. But this is the kind of event that I hope my readers will take as an example of what I would like to post from them in future entries on this blog.
I had some personal business to attend to on Monday morning, so my usual carpool routine was disrupted. As a result I had to take the train to work, which is not an unpleasant experience but cannot be classified as convenient. A train commute for me means I have to change trains once. It also means a twenty five minute layover at the transfer station.
The previous evening my girlfriend and I had had a long and serious discussion about what it means to be faithful to each other and true and good to yourself. This discussion had spurred many additional thoughts during the morning. I was twenty minutes into the layover when I texted the following message to her: “I have never believed in being vigilant about my own goodness. I thought knowing you were good was good enough. Now I know better.”
Not more than two minutes after I sent that text, a woman sat down next to me and began talking to me. If you have spent a lot of time waiting for trains, you know this is pretty unusual. My first thought was that maybe she was high or drunk. She was not dressed very well and she looked kind of beaten up.
It became apparent very quickly this was not the case. She simply needed someone to talk to, and, my God, what a story she had to tell. In the space of a year or two, her fifty seven year old husband had gone from a highly successful lawyer making mid-six figures to a heroin addict spending all of his time and money with a twenty two year old piece of white trash.
She was at the train station because she had been traveling for more than three hours to get to a hospital to pick up medication for a thyroid condition. Her husband was supposed to have picked her up early that morning to bring her to the hospital, but he was high out of his mind and his drug taking accomplice had taken off with the car. My first thought was, thank God, this isn’t life threatening.
Beyond that my thoughts were many and jumbled, but it would not be right to say I was confused. Although I was doing my best to process everything she was telling me, I could tell that all she needed was someone to listen to, and I just happened to be in the right spot at the right time for her.
So that is exactly what I did. I listened. My only responses were encouraging and conciliatory. I could have done exactly the opposite. I could have been predatory. I could have tried to take advantage of her vulnerability. But considering the text I had just sent my girlfriend, I would have rendered myself a complete hypocrite, and I have done that often enough in my life to know the price that you pay.
So I let her unload, and I grew. Her stop was before mine and before she left she hugged me and we exchanged phone numbers. I simply wanted to make sure she was okay. I told her my girlfriend would be proud of me and she said my girlfriend should realize how lucky she is. I just smiled.
She got off the train and I sat back, feeling more elated and purposeful than I had in a long time. This is the next text I sent to my girlfriend: “You will not believe the conversation I just had. God is amazing.”
He truly is.
If you consider all of the circumstances that had to occur to put me in that frame of mind and to put the two of us in that spot at that moment to have that conversation and give me the opportunity to help her so that she felt better and I was able to grow, then no reasonable person can deny the existence of a higher power watching over all of us. No matter what form of God you worship, you have to conclude that he was present on that platform.
A good day to everyone and may we all have the opportunity to help each other and grow in such fashion.