Sunday, October 17, 2010

Jimmy

Jimmy

Recently I reunited with an old classmate on facebook, who I went to school with. A young man who was short in stature, big in the heart, and strong as an ox. He went on to be a World Class Power lifter. He never thought about the tomorrows or anyone other than himself for a long time. One day, he realized his life was not going anywhere.

He had no home. He had no wife. He had no children. What he did have was inner strength and fortitude that he got from the upbringing of his mother.

Jimmy’s posts on face book were touching, kind, tender, giving and I asked one day, how he came about being the person that he is today.

Jimmy went to work for a quadriplegic man as a caregiver. A job, he’d never had before. “I think mostly when I started caring for George. Until that time I had never had the responsibility of taking care of someone who can’t take care of themselves, like you as a mother and your child. You always cared but took a different meaning when the child couldn’t take care of themselves – you had to take care of them when they were sick.”

I responded, “Interesting, but surely it wasn‘t an overnight awareness, but how did this all come about – prayer? Patience? Understanding? Compassion?” Jimmy, being the most absolute honest person I’ve ever met simple said, “Absolutely not. It has been a slow, steady growth. I have been taking care of George for nine years now. I have never shared this before, but I’ve had two DUI’s in my life. I’m not hardly a drunk, but the second DUI came when I was first taking care of George. He was left all by himself with no one to care for him. I felt so bad that I cried that I had let someone down that depended on me. That’s when I knew I was changing.”

“What we do to ourselves in one thing, what we do to others is another. Funny, when I goofed up before I thought it was just me that I was hurting, but if you think about it, the people that love and care for you suffers as well.”

We all have to go through our valleys to climb the mountains. And, sometimes growth for each of us is different. Jimmy concluded our conversation saying, “life is a starting point, we all have to start somewhere, it’s where we finish that counts.”

Isn’t it wonderful to know how God can change our hearts and minds, if we only open up to Him and let Him work His magic in our lives?

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