I sat down the other evening, mulling over what my day had been filled with and what tomorrow would hold. The T.V. was on in the background and the local news reader was reporting on the day in the region I live in.
It dawned on me that almost everything that was being reported was either filled with dread or contained a negative slant of some kind.
It was also at that point that my head did its usual thing of wandering off to find a nicer place to sit!
While it was there in “Better Place”, it picked up a paper that had been left on a bench.
At the top of the front page of the paper was the name of the paper – THE SUN.
But this was a different paper, no red top banner; instead it had a big circular sun in bright yellow. Inside the big yellow circle was a smiley face.
The slogan next to the big yellow sun was “The happy people’s paper”.
At first glance the front page story looked like any other National Paper – a picture of a person crying. On closer inspection, the story headline explained the tears; “With a little help from my friends”.
The story on the front page of this paper was about a lady who had lost her job due to the economic cutbacks being faced by everybody across the country.
Not one to sit around, she decided to use the time she now had to do something she had always wanted to do – Gardening.
Starting with her own garden, she transformed what was a neat, tidy garden into a horticultural masterpiece. This prompted words of amazement and wonder from her neighbours. This quickly spread to the rest of the street and further across the town she lived in.
Soon, there were knocks on her door, people from surrounding towns wanting to see this now well publicised garden. It turned out that the people of this town had spread the word. It was their way of letting people know that this woman was valued in their community and needed a little help. As part of their story, they had told of her plight, that she had lost her job but had used the time she had to make something beautiful rather than just slip away, not be seen and become a statistic.
Going back to the front page picture on the paper, the reason for the tears was that one of the people that knocked on her door happened to be the owner of a landscape gardening business and was so impressed with the lady’s efforts, they offered her a job! – Tears of Joy!
Now she has a job again, doing something she truly loves and all because the people that live around her rallied round someone when they were having a hard time trying to cope with all the bad stuff.
Of course, my head came back to sit in “This World” and thought about where it had just been in comparison to where it was now.
We have many different mediums for communicating news these days. Technology has expanded this into almost every home in the country. But nothing has ever come close to creating the impact that human behaviour can.
No newspaper or news programme can ever be more powerful than the human spirit either. When we combine to “do good”, we create magic – And you can’t deny just how good it makes you feel when you have been part of something good!
Whether it’s a donation of money or time to your favourite charity, or popping over the road to see if a neighbour is okay or just wants a chat and a cuppa, let’s create a better newspaper to pick up each morning –
We can do it with a little help from our friends/neighbours/colleagues etc, etc…
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