Monday, June 7, 2021 Tiny Heroism

I’ve been doing more biking lately and the path I usually take has a little pond near the place where I turn around to go back. Benches up the hill from the pond often beckon me to sit for a spell before moving on. One day recently a woman was there with her day care group of kids. I stopped to sit on one of the benches and watched them playing. One of the kids had a ball that got out of his hands and of course it ended up in the pond. I could see the quandary that this woman was in. She couldn’t send one of the kids to get the ball, just in case he/she fell in. She couldn’t leave her group of kids to go get the ball herself since they’d be unsupervised (and I know full well how much can happen in the space of very little time with young children). So I did what any normal human being would have done: I volunteered to go retrieve the ball.

If you try to imagine the lowest possible bar to set for heroic activity, what I did doesn’t even reach the bar. Yet when I got the ball and started heading back up the hill with it, the children gave me a round of applause as if I’d rescued each of them from a burning building, so great was their delight.

In my plodding, day-to-day existence, I don’t often feel like a hero. But that day, I did. And maybe that’s all heroism really is: helping others in time of need, no matter how small the deed or the need.

I got back on my bike and rode home, feeling the imaginary hero’s cape flapping in the wind behind me.

It is more blessed to give than to receive. Acts 20:35

I’ll probably delete this in the morning, which may, itself, be an heroic act.