Humility – The state or quality of being humble; a feeling of one’s own insignificance.
I used to have a long standing tradition with my oldest son to take him shopping and then to the Christmas Bureau to donate gifts for other children at this time of year. I started doing this with him when he was two years old. We moved from that to filling shoe boxes full of small gifts for children overseas. Then, somewhere in our busy lives we stopped doing both these things. My goal in this was to instill in my son the humility and thoughtfulness that I see is lost in young men today. Compassion and generosity for others does not seem to be something that is a cherished personality trait in boys any more and I refused to have those qualities be missing from any young man I was raising.
This past month as I found myself lying awake at night wondering how I was going to pull off Christmas again with a Kraft Dinner budget and stressing about what I am going to get for everyone and what internal organ I could sell to buy said gifts, it occurred to me that I lost my way. I had to remind myself that you are never to busy to take time out of your day to help those in need. So…. I signed the older boy and I up to fill Christmas food hampers at our local Christmas bureau. Yes, I expected some squawking from the boy about cutting into his Xbox time, however he just said, and I quote: “K”. Not even ok or aww man or any of that. Huh. Boy passed first character test.
So we head out to the church warehouse, meet the man in charge and get to work loading the tables up with the food that has been collected in the boxes for the “shoppers” to come around with each families list and fill the boxes. Perfect job for Ms. OCD! I get to stack and organize cans into their proper category and make everything all orderly and nice! Loving it. We do that for an hour then get delegated to “shopping” so the boy and I grab a cart and a family list and get to it. Yup, had fun with this one too. Every time we found something on the tables for a young kid on the list we celebrated (totally scored on the Chocolate Cheerios and Bear Paws – oh ya).
I gotta tell ya that I have had more than a few moments lately where I have been surprised at how greedy and ungrateful teenagers are. So I wasn’t surprised when we got to the warehouse and found that there was only one other teenager there with her mom and grandmother. BUT an hour later I was so humbled when a group of three teenage girls showed up to help (they were having a blast) and when we left a group of six teenage boys all piled out of one car and came in to help. All is not lost in the world.
I think both the boy and I learned a valuable lesson. There are people out there who cannot afford to buy Chocolate Cheerios for their kids and are truly struggling to make ends meet. The boy? He passed a few more character tests with me that’s for sure. Me? I was truly speechless when we got in the car to head home (speechless is not something that happens often for me so it felt weird). I realized that we both got a bit upset about there being no stewing tomatoes left and they were on our list. Who would have thought stewing tomatoes would cause us both heartache? I have had my slice of humble pie.
So you find yourself caught up in all the Holiday Greed and lose sight of what it is all really about I urge you to take the time to do something kind for someone you don’t know. Especially at this time of year. It’s a perfect way to humble oneself and get a reality check. Heck, bring a teenager. Might bring on a new found character trait and start their year off with a little less of “what about me” and a little more of “what about others” Oh, what the world could be!
