INNER PEACE

A friend put shared this nice piece I was in slab city in southern California, running a free kitchen called freedom cafe and while that's a random act of kindness in itself, sharing food isn't really what this story is about. I've been running free kitchens all over the US. since 1999 so sharing food is the norm for me. One day though while sharing food beneath the chocolate mountains a man approached me and asked if he could talk to me for a minute. I took a break to listen to what he had to say. He told me that he'd come out to the desert to kill himself because he had just lost his wife and daughter. He also told me, "I wanted to thank you, specifically, for saving my life." I laughed, "How did I save your life?" He said, “You showed me that there is still good in the world, and so I've decided not to kill myself." Now whenever I need to find my inner peace, I think of that day, that conversation and I find it. So when you think your kindness might not make a difference know that it does. That man went on to take a pregnant woman out of the desert, the baby wasn't his, brought her to his house in Maine to have the baby and went back down to the desert. Last I knew he was still in Slab City feeding kids and teaching them how to build simple structures for shelter. So it was like a three or four for one deal. You never know how far one random act of kindness can take the world. When last did you find inner peace?