Wanted: A Knight in Shining Armor

Has chivalry died? My answer would have to be a nice, loud, resounding YES!

Chapel today made me think about a certain experience I had yesterday. Our speaker in chapel was talking about how she used to have an office near the copy machine, and how whenever it would get jammed, people would automatically come to her to fix it, taking her away from what she had been working on. It annoyed her, and she'd yell at people often. One day she had a revelation though. When a woman came to her for help, she had a vision of Jesus She wasn't the strongest of Christians and didn't do anything like clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, or welcoming strangers. Yet she realized that day that those are just examples and that in Jesus' eyes feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the strangers are all good things, "yet whoever un-jams the copier for the least of these, has un-jamed it for him."

Yesterday I was unlucky enough to get stuck in a traffic jam on the 222. As anyone who has ever driven in my car would know, if my Jetta idles for an extended period of time, it overheats. I was in the left lane at the time, so I had to pull into the median strip, pop the hood, and wait for my engine to cool down. I figured I might as well wait for traffic to clear up before heading on, otherwise I'd get stuck idling for a while again, and have the car overheat once more. So there I sat for nearly three hours, with my hood up with steam pouring out of my engine. While sitting there I did a little study for the first half hour. During that half hour 3 police cars crept by slowly in the direction I had been going. Also, 2 others drove by in the opposite direction. Also, on my side of the road 17 large pickup trucks drove by, driven by men who looked like they'd be blue collar workers. Men who would be able to help a nice, young girl stranded on the highway. Most of them, while slowly creeping by, leaned out their windows to check out my car but none offered to help. Only one person actually paused by my car, and asked if I needed help, and that person happened to be a very sweet, and very old man, who wouldn't have actually been able to help me if my car had actually had something serious wrong with it. But he offered to help anyhow. And in case you were wondering, none of the cops even glanced in my direction. Two and a half hours later, as I was ready to finally leave, a cop pulled over on the other side of the median, and asked if I was ok. I assured him that i was, and then took off, after thanking him for actually caring.

Has our society really become so uncaring? This isn't the first time something like this has happened to me. As you all should know by now, I'm not the most graceful person on earth. I tend to trip over nothing rather often. I recall that at one point, people would ask if I was ok afterwards. These days I normally only receive harsh comments and nasty looks "Hey you! Watch where you are going ya' klutz!" And then I have to look at myself for a bit. How do I react in those situations? Am I quick to help people? Or am I one to shout out rude comments? Or do I just pretend that I don't see people in need of help because I don't want to be inconvenienced? It's something to think about I guess. I just need to remember "whoever has un-jammed the copier for the least of these people, has un-jammed it for him." Plus, it'll make me feel like I'm actually not a waste of space on this earth.