On being a blessing

We never know when we have blessed someone, when we may have been the very person they needed at a given moment. I have been reminded of this fact twice recently, both times when I was driving around my newly re-adopted hometown in Central Massachusetts. Yesterday, I was forced to take a detour on my way home because a house that had collapsed from the weight of snow on it was being demolished and the street was closed off. I wasn't sure how to get home, so I stayed on the street I was on, hoping another place to turn would come along. Eventually I stopped at a gas station to ask directions. The clerk behind the counter gave me one of the blankest looks I've ever had the misfortune to have turned on me. Lucky for me, her customer was able to tell me the way, and it turned out I was very close to home.

Then this morning, I was going to work, making my way through the narrow, snow-clogged streets of a blue-collar neighborhood and traffic in both directions came to a complete halt. I began to feel quite claustrophobic and was filled with panic. I put my car in park, got out and walked over to a vehicle trying to go in the opposite direction.

"Would you just talk to me for a minute, this is kind of a scary situation," I said to the young man behind the wheel. The woman next to him, whom I imagined to be his girlfriend, looked like she thought I was some kind of nut. But he talked to me in a calm and friendly way, saying he had seen a broken-down school bus behind him that was blocking traffic.

His kindness in talking to me for just a couple of minutes made me feel enough better to get back in my car, and soon the frozen traffic began, ever so slowly, to creep along. Just moving made me less panicky, and I was fine for the rest of the trip to work.

These two people turned up at moments when I needed help, and they blessed me with their presence.I am encouraged, thinking about them, to hope that I, too, have blessed others without knowing it.