Persons of Extraordinary Grace

One of the great gifts of my life is the astounding number of people I have had the opportunity to meet and interact with.

In a thirty-plus year career with Union Carbide and Dow, I was fortunate to meet people from all over the world, and from all economic strata.

There are many people that believe that where you were born, or what color your skin is, or how much money you have, or what your gender or gender identity is informs a person about you.

My experience with meeting so many different people from so many different places is that what you can see or know about a person in a chance meeting is nothing at all.

Except for a few remarkable exceptions, and I will call those people Persons of Extraordinary Grace.

What exactly to I mean by that?  I think I can only explain it by example.  I'll start with a famous example, and work my way back to examples that are no where near famous.

When I was seventeen or eighteen, I was lucky to get tickets to see the Phil Donahue show taped live in New York City.  The taping was very cool, and Phil Donahue was the darling of daytime television back then.  At the end of the taping, Phil invited the audience to stay and meet a couple of friends of his that happened to be there. The first was his future wife, Marlo Thomas, who was his girlfriend at the time.  Then Marlo introduced her father, Danny Thomas.

Danny Thomas was a Person of Extraordinary Grace.  Danny Thomas was the driving force behind the creation of St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.  Danny had made a vow to God that if he achieved success in show business, he would build a shrine to St. Jude Thaddeus, and that shrine is St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.

When I met Danny Thomas at that taping of the Phil Donahue show, I was impressed with his incredible presence. He possessed an incredible goodness of spirit that was impossible to deny.  I call that innate goodness grace.

Now for a more ordinary example.  I was traveling by train from Indiana to New Jersey when my daughter was seven months old.  In an extraordinary feat of coordination, she hooked her binky and flung it off the train while we were traveling between cars.  She really loved that binky.  She was teething.  I could only afford a regular seat, not a sleeper, and the other passengers were quite vocal in their displeasure sharing a compartment with a crying baby.  I spent most of the night in the ladies lounge attached to the rest room.  Because I was traveling alone, everywhere I went, baby and diaper bag went with me.  Early in the morning, an older (late sixties, early seventies) well dressed woman came into the ladies room, as I was struggling to hold the diaper bag, the baby, and wash my hands.   She offered to hold my baby so that I could wash my hands properly, and maybe even wash my face.  I was beyond grateful for her help.  And then came the moment of extraordinary grace.

After washing up and collecting my daughter, the woman shared that she almost didn't offer to help, because she wasn't sure I would be comfortable with a "colored woman"(her words) holding my baby.  And then I knew I was in the presence of a Person of Extraordinary Grace.  I imagined that in her lifetime which had included Jim Crow laws she had been admonished for approaching white people.  But she saw a girl in a tough spot, and had the courage to risk rejection to offer help.  God's love on earth - extraordinary grace.

My dad was a Person of Extraordinary Grace.  He lit up a room.  He made people feel better.  He encouraged and supported and cared deeply about people.

Persons of Extraordinary Grace aren't perfect.  They are ordinary humans like you and me in many ways.  They get angry.  They make mistakes.  They fail.  But they possess an extraordinary capacity for love, for putting others before themselves, and for sharing God's love with others in a tangible way.   I am blessed to have many Persons of Extraordinary Grace in my life, and to have brushed past many Persons of Extraordinary Grace in my travels.

We all know Persons of Extraordinary Grace.  We know them by what they do and how they are the good they want to see in the world.  We know them because they always make us feel better when we are with them.  We don't know them because they look a certain way or dress a certain way.  Persons of Extraordinary Grace make themselves known by how they act.

And here is the best part.  We were all created with the potential to be Persons of Extraordinary Grace.  We all have the capacity to do great things.  To be the good we want to see in the world.  To build people up.  To risk rejection and scorn in order to help.  We won't all have the ability to change the world for the better the way that Danny Thomas did with St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, but we all have the ability to change someone's world at a moment in time with a singular act of kindness.

And that matters. Each and every kind act matters.  Each and every sacrifice on behalf of another matters.  Each and every act of love for each other matters.  We can make the world a safer, more welcoming, more loving place.  One Person of Extraordinary Grace at a time.