Being selfless

I should be truthful; I do not have a lot of practice in selfLESS ness. Now selfISHness, I rock that. But occassionally I am presented with the opportunity to help people out, even when all I want to do is hang out at home with the boys. Especially when I have to lug the two of them around with me serving others.

Take today for instance. I had planned to go to the office & work while my helper was here to watch the small child, but at 8 this morning my phone rings. I didn't want to answer it. But I did. It was the mom of the girl who got hit by a car last week. {I think I forgot to blog about that. Two girls were victims of a hit-n-run accident, taken to the hospital where they were treated but refused medicine, so i had to take them the next day to another clinic to get checked out and get medicine}

I was supposed to take her back tomorrow morning to get her stitches out, but her mom called and said, "Did you get her yet?" Gotta love a conversation that starts off like that, huh?

"No, her appt is for tomorrow," I say. Then the mom starts talking about how they are going to see the grandmother {though Joel thought she told him last week that the grandmother died, so it is possible that they are going to the funeral tomorrow} in the mmorning and no, she really needs to go today.

And then silence, where I am refusing to be generous and ruin my day and she is refusing to be generous and accept the crumbs of charity I was offering her.

So I say that I will check and see if I can figure something out. I finally decided to take her this afternoon. I had to pick up a friend from the bus station at noon, so I went to Coffee Bean and worked on my insane backlog of emails, picked Jack up from school & took my friend out to the {not American} embassy, where she found out that they LOST her passport.

Right. Lost it. But here comes the best part...

THEY LOST 600 OTHER PASSPORTS ALONG WITH HERS. How is that even possible? So she spent 5 hours today {total} on a mini bus only to find out that the passport she submitted FOUR MONTHS AGO got lost, nobody told her and now it's going to be another two weeks before they issue the new one.

Anyway, as soon as I dropped her off, I went home and got my small child, dropped off my helper and went to pick up the girl. Turns out her aunt is having some stomach trouble, so she went with me.

It took literally like three minutes to remove the stitches, but it took TWO HOURS for the doctors (THREE of them that she saw) to tell her that there is nothing wrong with her...even though she is in such bad pain that she can't work. Two hours and hundreds of ringgits to hear that nothing is wrong. Bleh.

But I made a new friend, and I am trying to focus on that. :) By the time we got home, all I had the energy to do was pour some cereal, give the kids a bath and put them to bed. It is 7:30 right now, and I am about to head that way in a sec, too.

To wrap it all up, I explained to Jack on the way home about why we help people...God loves us, He has blessed us with money, and because we love him we use that money to help people that God loves, too. His response? "Well, Mom, remember that time we didn't have enough money for that toy I wanted?" This I am sure would have been followed by a request to spend that extra money on his toy instead of on poor people had I not interrupted with a reminder that he has a LOT of toys and lets say a prayer thanking God for all of those toys.