A lesson in compassion

I witnessed a young homeless man and his dog crossing the road during a red light. A guy in a big SUV became outraged and tried to make it look like he was going to hit him and did, in fact, come close to hitting the dog. The homeless man was definitely a little intoxicated. He started yelling at the SUV: “just come talk to me about it. I’m a human too.” He seemed about to cry.

My 15-year-old and I decided to try and cheer him up. I only had $5.00 but I drove around to the curb where he was standing. I asked him to come to my window and we gave him the $5.00 and said, “I just wanted to give you a small thing to cheer you up. I just saw that the SUV almost hit you.” He had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. He took the $5.00 and said, “I know some people are just having bad days, but all he had to do is talk to me.”

I don’t know how much that $5.00 helped his day but it did make a big impact on my daughter to see me do that. I wanted to show her compassion and how it works. Teenagers can be very selfish and with social media it seems to be getting worse. She was proud of us and told our family and friends about the incident later. So maybe it meant more to her than it did to the young homeless man. – Wendy 🙂