Wednesday, May 25, 2016

            We spent a good part of the long weekend up in Goderich where our youngest daughter and her fiancé have made their home.  We hadn’t seen them lately, so it was great to have a long visit. The weather was perfect. We toured the farmer’s market and the beach and ate at a good local restaurant down by the water.  We especially enjoyed meeting Finzy for the first time – a gregarious, eight-months old, Newfie dog. It was hard to come back home.

            You may recall that Goderich was the small town who was ravaged by a F3 tornado in 2011. The downtown was hit especially hard. Stores, businesses, churches were utterly destroyed. There is a plaque where the United Church used to be.

            But today, there is scant evidence of the devastation. The town valiantly engaged in rebuilding itself. People pitched in to help each other to pick up the pieces and start anew. There may be a few, old, tree stumps here and there, but the town has survived and thrived and is as good as new; maybe better if they can keep alive the spirit of community and helpful neighbourliness.

            Stories like what happened in Goderich or what is happening in Fort MacMurray remind us of the resilience, strength and resolve of people under deep duress.  When we come together we make the whole community stronger and better able to face the challenges that are ahead.

            A lot of people believe that the adage, “God helps those who help themselves,” is a verse out of the Bible. It is not!  That doesn’t make it wrong, necessarily, but I would like to suggest that the better, more-approximate, biblical-like, Jesus-like saying would sound more like, “God helps those who help others.”

            Jesus didn’t “invent” the Golden Rule (other religions have their own versions of it), but he did give us the most positive expression of it: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you,” (Matthew 7:12).  We often leave out the little phrase “in everything”. There are no exceptions in doing good for other people. "Here is a simple, rule-of-thumb guide for behavior: Ask yourself what you want people to do for you, then grab the initiative and do it for them,” (The Message).

            Jesus talked more about what makes for good community than anything else. His concerns were for others every step of his Way. He gave us clear principles to put flesh to the Golden Rule: forgiveness, justice, equality, sharing, non-violence, making sacrifices, trust, kindness, and the list goes on.

            It shouldn’t take a disaster to call these qualities out of us.