Dunedin, New Zealand, my city - my people

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Two warm fuzzies

Yesterday turned out to be an OK day for me. We had a guy ring the church office to ask how he could make a donation to the church. At lunch time he arrived in overalls. He fished in his pocket and pulled out an old glasses case and opened it. "I have some spare cash lying around and thought you should have it." With that he dropped $100 worth of crumpled notes on my desk. We asked questions about why etc. He said he had read about the Christmas Dinner in the newspaper and must have walked past the church when our drop-in was open. He said, "You do good stuff and I thought I could help." He left saying, "You will be seeing me from time to time." He never gave us his name, where he worked or anything, he just thought we "did good stuff".

I got home sometime after 6p.m. and went to the letter box. There was a card addressed to Rev Dave Brown. Inside the card was a quantity of petrol vouchers. The card read, "To Dave, hope you had a good holiday, thanks for listening!" There was no signature or identifying marks on the card. I have my suspects, I suspect an officer at the fire brigade but there are other possibilities.

Both gifts are appreciated, running such things as drop-in centres, and life in general gets expensive and such help is welcome. But they are worth a whole lot more than their dollar value. In my job often you wonder what the hell you do? Successes are often hard to see and people are free with criticism and express their opinions on everything. (I sometimes wonder why the church isn't booming, there are people of all ages in my church who as far as they are concerned, seem to know a lot about how to run a church!) These gifts say to me, "Sometimes at any rate you are doing the right thing. " They affirm that sometimes at least, I am "doing good stuff", and that affirmation is worth heaps. If you are one of the donors, thanks a lot.

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