One deed of an individual may decide the fate of the world. 
~ Abraham Heschel

I confess to a wee bit of eye-rolling in response to the GBS otherwise known as The Gideon’s Bible Syndrome. Most of you who have spent time pilfering hotel bathrooms of tiny bars of soap, bottles of shampoo, or mouthwash (say what?!) and then moved on to drawers in dressers and end tables looking for free pens and notepads (that’s rather accusatory) have no doubt come across a Gideon’s Bible placed there courtesy of Gideon International, an evangelical organization whose main ministry is the free distribution of bibles. When I think of a Gideon’s Bible, I think of staying in hotels while on basketball and baseball road trips when I was in college. More specifically I think of how at the front of all their bibles is a section called “Bible Helps” where you will find topics from Bitter and Bullied to Gambling and Gossip to Lonely and Lust to Peer Pressure and Pregnancy to Stealing (for you pilferers) and Swearing. Under each topic there are listed Bible verses to comfort, ease your pain, offer you hope, poke your guilt, and steer you clear of the path to perdition or the tiny bottles of shampoo and towels.

I also remember the Index or what I called “The Answers in the Back.” In the Index (at least back in the 1970’s) there was always a subsection in all caps titled: HELP IN A TIME OF NEED beneath which was a list of human predicaments. Things like—Comfort in Time of LONELINESS, Relief in Time of SUFFERING, Peace in Time of TURMOIL, Strength in Time of TEMPTATION. You get the idea. I seem to recall I discovered this section because I was searching for something like: Difficulty in Hitting a CURVEBALL or SYMPATHY for Going Two for Twelve from the free throw line. After each of these circumstances or conditions were counteracting antidotes in the form of scripture verses. The Gideon’s Bible Syndrome. Oh, if only all it took was reading those corresponding passages to survive the daily onslaught of a bully’s meanness, to dodge temptation or trauma or tragedy, to feel less isolated and alone, therapists and spiritual directors would have more time on their hands and I’d have been a Major Leaguer.

And yet recently I had my comeuppance that left me wiping the egg from my face. But gladly so. I was accidentally in the right place at the right time—or listening to NPR at the right moment. Perhaps like you—and despite not even owning a TV— the seemingly endless litany of tragedies and the daily deliverance of bad news had gotten to me: the diabolical war in Ukraine, the earth and life-shattering quake in Turkey and Syria killing nearly 50,000 people, the Taliban prohibiting women from attending universities in Afghanistan, the young teen who died from suicide after being beaten and bruised in the hallway of her school by classmates then humiliated on the social network, the unconscionable outright lying at Fox News for greed’s sake, the nationally covered trial of the disgraced, blue-blooded South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh who was found guilty of executing his wife and youngest son, and on and on seemingly ad infinitum. I needed an antidote to all this anti-gospel.

There is a podcast on NPR hosted by Shankar Vedantam called The Hidden Brain. Within that marsupial podcast is another tiny but poignant, hope-filled podcast that began in October 2021 that comes on once a week. Maybe you’ve heard it: My Unsung Hero. I am a regular listener to NPR but I had never heard this short podcast (each episode is between 3-5 minutes) until February of this year. Vedantam, in good Gideon style, created this little pick-me-up of a show specifically to play a small part in countering the seemingly perpetual tsunami of doom and gloom, misery and madness, wretchedness and despair that fills our airwaves and ceaselessly appears on our screens sucking us in and pulling us down. He calls them antidotes to despair. Of his intention, he writes: “Each episode reveals what the news ignores: everyday acts of kindness and courage that transformed someone’s life. Listen — and renew your faith in humanity.”

Once I happened upon it, I was hooked. It resonated with my conviction that holiness is largely hidden and resides within the thoughtful gesture, the encouraging look, the empathetic nod, the charitable word, the common deed, and the not-so-random acts of kindness, compassion, and selflessness. Rabbi Heschel speaks of this as the divinity of deeds claiming that sacred acts—whatever the size—not only imitate but also represent the Divine. I am convinced that the authentic spiritual life is made up of a string of such small pearls. In his short book on Christian ministry, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections On Christian Leadership, Henri Nouwen plays off the three temptations of Christ in the desert by identifying the three temptations for pastoral ministers. Sandwiched between the temptation to be relevant and the temptation to be powerful, the second temptation he calls the temptation to be spectacular. I think this is a temptation for more than just religious leaders. In a culture enamored with the rich and famous, All-Stars and pop-stars, celebrities and athletes dubbed the G.O.A.T. (the greatest of all-time), if it is not a temptation, it is for many a dream and a desire and, I believe, an unreasonable and unworthy goal, and a misconception of what it means to live well and be great.

My Unsung Hero invites people to tell of a time when someone reached out to them in a simple act of goodwill, kindheartedness, and common humanity. It offers a striking contrast to the fallacies that big is better, that the more public, flashy, and spectacular the action the more important it is and the more deserving of our attention, celebration, and praise. Certainly, the downwardly mobile, kenotic life of Jesus flies in the face of this assumption.

After I heard My Unsung Hero live for the first time, I searched and discovered over two years of archived episodes. At first, I began to listen to the most recent ones. Much to my surprise, the third storyteller was someone I knew. She was a first-year student of theology and her husband was a woodworker who lived on the first floor of the student apartments where I lived the year I began my theological studies as well. After listening to a handful of episodes, I changed course, went back to the first episode, and worked my way from the earliest to the most recent.

You only need to hear a dozen or so episodes before recognizing the common threads to the stories people choose to tell about being on the receiving end of someone’s thoughtfulness or generous spirit. And paradoxically, the secret sauce of why they are so unforgettable and moving to listen to is because we all have had an experience or two like these and because of the combination of these ingredients. First, the encounters they describe and what the person did was almost always something simple, small, and ordinary, anything but spectacular or heroic. Second, they are about experiences and people that the storyteller has never forgotten no matter how long ago it happened or how brief the encounter was. Third, except for one week devoted to influential teachers, most of the storytellers never got the name of the person who helped them. So they often end by saying something like, “If you are out there and happen to be listening, or if you know who this person is, I want to say thank you. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.” And lastly, despite how simple and small the act of self-giving, many of the recipients now telling their story often say “It changed my life.”

From the first or second podcast that I listened to, what was most significant for me—despite my Gideon’s Bible bias against suggesting easy antidotes to difficult life experiences, was that I could immediately feel how it affected my mood and lifted my spirit. Most shocking of all was how after listening to only a handful of these podcasts, I had this surprisingly powerful Aha! moment and sudden realization. “Oh my gosh,” I thought, “this is happening all over the world all the time.” Despite seeming so obvious, it struck me with such delight and gladness that the sensation stayed with me for days. I could viscerally feel the rush and elation counteracting and diminishing any lingering sense of hopelessness, disgust, grief, or dread that is so often the constant residue of the plight of our planet and humans acting so inhumanely.

At the risk of sounding cliché, each alone and all strung together, these mini-acts of kindness served to  “restore my faith in humanity.” It wasn’t pollyannaish in the least. It wasn’t as if it suddenly wiped from my memory the terror so many suffer in this world every day and the viciousness and violence perpetrated upon humans and other-than-human life forms by humans. And yet, the feeling of my Aha! is still with me: “Oh my gosh, this is happening all over the world all the time.” And it makes me want to join my small but conscious, intentional, and unselfish acts of thoughtfulness, gentle presence, generosity, hospitality, tender mercy, sympathy, compassion, and encouragement with all of you and all those do-gooders around the world in a holy communion of all that’s best in us and an allusion to the God of radical love embodied in Jesus.

In my short reflection this past Monday, I mentioned that Lent and its practices are usually associated with practices of subtraction: fasting, abstaining, refraining, giving something up. I’d like to share with you this simple spiritual practice of addition that has made a small but significant difference in my life. The other day a friend asked me via email “How are you observing Lent this year?” I’m responding to her here now. I think it is a helpful way of observing Lent. I see this practice as both an act of resistance, an act of communion, and an act of hope that lifts my spirit. Given that the spirituality of Lent is two-fold—penitential and baptismal, it is appropriate to have a practice that renews baptismal hope in the face of whoever and whatever sows seeds of distrust, despair, and destruction.

Each night when I go to bed, I turn off the light, lie flat on my back, place my cell phone on my chest right below my chin and I listen to two or three episodes of My Unsung Hero. It takes about ten minutes. And I fall off to sleep inspired, encouraged, and full of hope because I know these kinds of acts about which I just heard are happening all over the world all the time by people like you. Thank you, one and all.

♣ ♣ ARE YOU INTERESTED IN SPIRITUAL DIRECTION ONLINE? Would you benefit from having a trustworthy companion to listen to your hopes, struggles, yearnings, and burning questions? Someone who will hold space for you and pay attention with you to your quiet desire to cultivate a life of spiritual depth and meaning and deepen your connection to the One from whom all wonder, joy, and blessings flow? I am offering spiritual direction online. If you, or someone you know, are interested in beginning or returning to spiritual guidance CLICK HERE where you will find both practical information and explanations of spiritual direction. I’d be honored to hear and hold your unfolding story.