I don’t know what your destiny will be. But one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer
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The
Gun Angel (a story)
You are home alone watching TV. A stranger comes to the
door. He looks friendly enough, so you open the door
to talk. He immediately pulls a gun on you and makes you go
inside. He leads you to your living room and makes you sit
down. He sits down too and tells you that he is a hit man who
usually kills pushers and other bad people who are his boss'
competition. So he does his job without remorse. But
recently he had to kill a good person who was going to go to the
police, and now he feels great guilt. To alleviate his guilt, he
wants you to save 100 lives in the next six months and plant 1,000
trees, or get someone else to do these things. If you don't,
he or one of his buddies who you would never recognize will kill
you
— or someone you love.
He says that when he leaves, you'll realize you have two
choices: Either you can put all your energy into trying to
protect yourself and your loved ones, but there is no way to protect
yourself and them from a bullet that can come from anywhere at any time.
Or you can put your energy into achieving his demands.
Then he tells you facts about yourself: that you are a decent
person who does such-and-such volunteer work. He also knows where you work, and that you
are unhappy with your job. You feel terror as he describes
the daily routine of someone you love. You complain that you
can't possibly do all he asks in just six months. But he
says. "Learn. Ask people. Use the Internet. —
Just find a way." To make his point he presses the
barrel of his gun under your chin and forcefully pushes the barrel and your chin up. You feel
the cold metal. As he leaves, he says, "And you have to
find a job that will make you happy.
—
Make that your third
goal."
After he leaves, you sit down to calm yourself. You happen
to look at the TV again. There is an action drama on.
Suddenly you realize that your life has become more dramatic and
gripping than any TV show. You are the unwilling main
character.
But for a month you are in denial. It all seems so
unreal. That is, until one day when you let your cat out and
it returns drenched in cow's blood. You know he's out there,
watching.
You begin to do research and find tree-planting organizations that
can plant six or more trees for a dollar. So 1,000 trees
would be only about $166 dollars. You start to feel some
optimism since that wasn't too hard to do. You do more
research and find that infants in the developing nations often die
without immunization, or hydration when they have diarrhea. This
can be done for only a couple dollars per child. You even
find it easy to look for a job, and after a couple of months of
searching you find one you really like. Later, two months into your new job with friendlier people, you kick
yourself for having put up with the job you hated for so many
years.
Finally the six month ends, and nothing happens. Two more
months go by. Just when you think you will never see him again, you wake up one morning to find him sitting on the
edge of your bed with his gun in his hand. He makes you get up and show
him the proof that you saved the lives and planted the
trees. Fortunately you have documentation from the
charities you supported.
Once he is satisfied with your paperwork, he relaxes and says, "I
lied when I told you I was a hit man. I'm actually an angel. I used to
be the Angel of Death, and it was my job to take away people's souls
at the end of their lives." He shakes his head sadly, saying "You will never know how it feels to bear away
all those children every single day. You'll never witness what I saw: The unmitigated waste of thousands of lives, and the lacerated hearts
of those left behind."
He looked down and paused. "It bothered
me to know that other people, even decent people like you, could
do so much more good with just a little more focus." As he said
focus he tapped the handle of his gun and winked.
"I'm sorry that at first I made you feel
fear and the hopelessness of feeling trapped in an awful situation. But extremely poor parents feel the same fear and
hopelessness day after day. You did a hundred times more good because
your heart and your brain were in it." Having
said that, he smiled radiantly and disappeared.
Commentary: Although the person in the story probably
did a hundred times as much good as before, there's a huge difference
between saving a child's life and providing him or her with the
food, education and health needs of a lifetime. There is a
further huge jump between meeting one person's needs and
stabilizing a nation economically. In other words, it takes
more effort than a few good donations to change the world. On the other hand, even a couple hours of
strategic thought and effort can
dramatically boost the good that you do.
If
you can take 20 minutes to read our page of high-level
strategies and upgrades and then take another 20 minutes to
browse our program materials that
embody these strategies, you may actually begin to see that good can
be done on a scale many people can't imagine. Each upgrade
over how you currently do good brings us that much closer to
a better world.
Attitude, however, is key. Here attitude means deciding to live
whole-heartedly: Doing your level best for yourself andfor others. That's why we say:
"Act as if your
children's lives were on the line and not someone else's. Your
Molly, your Jason, your Sophía,
your Kizito, your Ululoloa, your Prajhi, your
Ling. Act as if you can see their faces."
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