Good News of the Week in Review

On Saturdays the New York Times includes several short paragraphs  highlighting some good news items from the previous week.  That’s where I turn first, before tackling the rest of the paper, which is mostly bad news.

Often an unsung hero makes it onto that page.  For example: When he was 18, a young man in Pittsburgh began ushering at the Pirates’ baseball park. He retired a few weeks ago… 81 years later!   I guess he wanted the day off for his 100th birthday. This story warms my heart. It’s the sort of a life that is often made public too late, in an obituary.

And another: A  man traveled to the United States  from Italy as he does every year at this time. In addition to toothbrush, change of clothes and passport, his main baggage was a cargo of nine million honeybees.  The article didn’t report how he crossed the ocean. Was it aboard ship?  That’s a long trip. The bees would need sustenance. Did the shipping company need to plant a field of clover in the hold?  Or by air? The bees would probably be okay without nectar on a seven or eight hour flight. Given that it’s unlikely he had them in his carry-on luggage, the hives would be stowed in cargo, where it’s really cold 35,000 miles above the earth. Did he wrap each hive in a warm blanket, or perhaps he sewed nine million little yellow jackets?   In any case, beekeeper and bees made it safely to New York.  A few days later (I imagine the bees needed to get over their seasickness or jet lag), beekeepers came from all five boroughs to collect bees for their hives.   Two million went to beekeepers who had hives in their gardens, on rooftops and, at least one, in an apartment.  Then he went on to cities all over the country to distribute the remaining seven million.

Wouldn’t it be a nice change if stories like that made it to the front page?  One man doing what he can to make a difference. Granted, even nine million bees spread out over the country won’t end the crisis of bee colony collapse in a year.  But it’s a beginning.  And if he comes every year, as apparently he does, the trend could start to reverse.

My hunch is that just as there are now nine million new bees doing what bees do, there are also at least  nine million people in our country making a difference in their own small way.  From a young girl who started a road race in her community to raise funds for cancer research because a family member was living with the disease.  Or a man who gathered a few of his friends to save a wetlands area slated to be destroyed by toxic river sludge.  A New Jersey schoolteacher who met an African mother and together they began building schools for girls in Kenya.

I think back to the week I went on a rebuilding trip to New Orleans in 2007.  Almost two years after Katrina thousands of homes were gone, thousands of people still homeless or living in toxic FEMA trailers. We worked for six days with a non-profit group called RHINO (Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans).  All we could manage in that time was one house, and even then we had to leave it unfinished. It felt like a very small drop in a very big bucket. Every morning,  before we headed out to work, our group leader would read an inspiration for the day.  One still stays with  me:  It’s an excerpt from Bishop Ken Unterer’s tribute to murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it very well.

I suspect that everyone has a “something” that motivates them.  It need not be the size of a shipload of bees, but can be as small as one bee.  One bee carrying one grain of pollen begins a cycle of new growth. One seed dropped into the ground, given enough time, becomes a tree. One student waking up to the joy of learning or one child with an idea for a road race.

In the words of Mother Teresa:

Not all of us can do great things; but we can do small things with great love.