Sometimes you want to save the world. Fight injustice, feed and care for the masses. Sometimes it starts with a little, sometimes, and it’s something major.
Long before I became a Baha’i, I was the typical teenager of the 70's. I wasn’t a true hippie or flower child but I always seemed to care something more about everybody around me. Maybe it was the persecuted child that was always picked on growing up. Maybe, it was that somewhere along the road of life someone taught me how to care about others.
I made friends of the kids nobody would talk to. I shared my toys with other kids that didn’t have any. I just seem to understand what it was like. I didn’t have a lot growing up, in fact if anything I grew up wearing mostly hand-me downs until I started earning my own money babysitting. I learned to sew early on and made most everything I wore in junior high and high school.
My first missions for the greater good, were simple things. I walked 13 miles two times in walks to end world hunger and raised money. I fought to save an elephant that was at risk of being put down at a local zoo.
I later married and when my children were little we walked yearly in Phoenix for the Martin Luther King Holiday. We walked from the first year and kept marching until Arizona declared MLK Day. We walked side by side with people of all races, sexes and ages. My parents were afraid the first year because my siblings wanted to join the march with us. They remembered the days of the marches in the south and were afraid of reprisals against the marchers. You cannot imagine the power of all those people bonding together peacefully for one common cause, even better yet you can’t imagine the crowds. Never did one person say a bad thing toward anybody in the march. My family of seven blond blue-eyed people and our Baha’i friends were at the front of the march, and we were not back more than twenty people from the front. We sang “We Shall Over Come,” we made new friends and we stood for something.
My missions never stop, sometimes they are helping a friend in time of crisis, sometimes they are standing together with strangers to correct injustice. Have you given any thought on how just a simple act of kindness can change the world? If, you don’t have time or money to save the world at this point in time, look for the simple things you can do; smile at a stranger and greet them, do a favor for a neighbor or a co-worker. There is always something you can do, remember the little things can change the world.
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