Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

A whole man, an undamaged man, that was the person Liz and I met there in Springfield. Whole because Dick Riley's capacity for caring was intact. "This is my commandment," Jesus says, "that you love one another" (John 15:12 RSV). This is the common currency of heaven.

For some, this agape love is as natural as breathing. I'm married to one of them. One of his mother's favorite stories was about the day John, age six, asked her to do the lettering for a sandwich board he'd constructed. The wording on both chest and back, he instructed, was to be the same:

THIS BOY HELPS PEOPLE.

For weeks, his mother recalled, John walked up and down the sidewalk, displaying this announcement and performing small services for obliging neighbors.

This boy still helps people -- friends, casual acquaintances, total strangers. A stranger, to John, is a friend he hasn't met yet. I'll leave our table at a restaurant in some town where we've never been, be gone five minutes, and come back to find another chair pulled up, John and a "really interesting guy" in rapt conversation.

My father, though he'd have denied it, was another lover of people. He saw himself as a hard-boiled New York detective, inured to sad stories. Panhandlers' tales in particular. "Dropping money in a cup won't help anyone. Give someone a handout, you make him an emotional cripple." Yet he was incapable of passing a beggar without reaching into his pocket.

There was a bag lady whose chosen corner was Vanderbilt Avenue and 43rd Street, a block from his office. How Daddy discovered that her shoe size was the same as mine I never knew. Scarves, sweaters, mittens, all of us in the family were accustomed to see these appropriated for "someone who needs this." But shoes! I had to hide my cherished pair of loafers from Daddy's sudden raids on behalf of a charity he didn't know he possessed.