If a young child were to look at the sky and imagine how the world should be... What would they see? What would they say? What would they have us grown-ups do?
When a child looks up to the clouds, they see pictures and creatures, and a world full of adventure... We adults are prone to look to the ground where our feet tread, oftentimes oblivious to the roses, much less likely to stop and smell them! How often we grown-ups forget to dream, to reach up, to look out and to see the world of adventure beyond the tasks of the day. How often we fail to see what a child sees and fail to dream beyond ourselves.
If a child who has plenty were to learn that countless many children around the world suffer hardships and deprivation beyond measure, then that child would want the suffering child to have what he/she already has. And if they could, they'd want to give the best that life could offer to the suffering child. When that interchange of love, provision and hope is given out and then received, the lives of those with plenty and those with little would never be the same again...! And they would know for sure that they had both changed their world for good.
Having been a child who experienced severe problems learning to walk due to orthopaedic challenges from birth, I became a child who learnt to overcome life's obstacles. I was blessed with parents and a country-town community who not only cheered me on through those childhood difficulties, but who kept cheering me on for the rest of my childhood and long into my adult years, long after I could walk...! Those encounters changed my life.
Other encounters further shaped me to become the "cheer-leader" that my parents were for me.
I was the child asked by my teacher to take care of the new, lost-looking, non-English-speaking Japanese student in my 1st grade class. I was the child asked to look after the scruffy, cowering boy in my 5th-grade class, abused so many times by his father that he had become significantly hearing impaired... and also the one who first sounded the alarm that his eyesight was impaired. He wasn't naughty for no reason; he just couldn't see the blackboard to read it...! I was the student asked to come alongside the severely mentally and physically challenged student many years my senior, to be his scribe for his major exams long before the days of laptops and keyboards in classrooms...! I was the child who stood up to bullies in the playground when they chose to prey on defenceless and vulnerable "kids at risk." Weirdly, the same "bullies" would vote me in for student leadership and representative councils...!
These kinds of encounters were a recurring pattern in my childhood and impacted me greatly. They became a very important part of the fabric of my life. They seeded the leader, the advocate and the "cheerleader" in me!
Even from a very young age, I wanted people to know that they were valued and much-loved. Above and beyond that, I wanted people to value and much-love the people in their world, just as my parents and country-town community valued and loved me.
