Living in The Realm of Possibility

 Continued from the “Pay it Forward” blog

Quote: “Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish” Jean de la Fountaine

What does the world expect of you?
The movie, Pay it Forward, asks this question of a social studies class filled with twelve-year olds.
Their answer, “Nothing–the world expects nothing of us.”

Reuben St. Clair, the teacher and protagonist in the book, Pay It Forward, starts a movement with this voluntary, extra-credit assignment: THINK OF AN IDEA FOR WORLD CHANGE, AND PUT IT INTO ACTION. Trevor, the 12-year-old hero of Pay It Forward, thinks of quite an idea.  Click here PAY IT FORWARD – ASSIGNMENT TO SAVE THE WORLD

The premise of Pay it Forward is brilliant in its simplicity: help three people and they each help three people in return.  The chain reaction to this idea is deafening. 

Of course if we believe administrations and programs will solve the world’s problems, why would we enter into this assignment?  After all, it is easy to think that there are others with more brainpower, more money and more connections that will make the difference. What does the world expect of me? Perhaps more than we know.

There is a great awakening in us when we realize what we are made for.  I am not referring to a job or career as much as a way of being. When we know we are on a personal mission and that the world expects something of us, the playing field changes.  The second great awakening comes when we see the power of one in action.  We all hear the stories of men and women who rise up against incredible odds to create change that flips the impossible around like a pancake. The strand connecting them is that they are ordinary people who believe in the power of one. Let me introduce you to a few of those people.

Meet Elissa Montanti, a woman who single-handedly changed the lives of 50 children around the world. Though she started with no funding and no political connections, that didn’t stop her from providing hope and healing.

It started 10 years ago with a simple letter, a plea for help from a boy in Bosnia.
The letter read: “I am asking all God and merciful people to help me get prosthetic limbs.”

“He had stepped on a land mine and had lost both arms and a leg,” says Elissa Montanti. “I looked at this and said to myself, ‘My god, what can I do?’

“Kenan came and, while he lived with me for four months, he received state-of-the-art prosthetics and rehabilitation,” Montanti says. “And Kenan went back with two new arms and a leg and a new life.” “She gave me my life back,” Kenan Malkic says. “She gave me my life back.”

Now a 23-year-old college student, Malkic lives with Montanti while he attends school in the United States.

Through helping Malkic, Montanti realized she had found her life’s purpose.

“I knew the pain that he went through and that there were so many other children similar to him,” she says. “And so I started my mission. Global Medical Relief Fund.” Its aim is to reach kids like Kenan, maimed by war or natural disaster, wherever they are in the world.
….

Meet Paul White, a teacher who has turned around the lives of Los Angeles gang members in a unique one-room schoolhouse. 
 Paul White sports a shirt that says “Miracles Happen,” and miracles happen every day at the West Valley Leadership Academy in Los Angeles. That’s because this teacher gives his students equal doses of reading, writing and respect.

“Schools like mine are set up for kids for whom the traditional system has not worked,” White says. “Everything from chronic truants to repeat offenders, gang members, criminals, students who’ve had trouble with drugs or alcohol addiction, we get every child you could say is ‘at-risk.’ “

White’s students find their power and purpose both inside and outside the classroom. Not only are the walls adorned with inspirational phrases, students do charity work — everything from forming a street clean-up crew to donating their hair to cancer patients. As Aristotle said, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is not education at all.”
….

Meet Sandra La Day.  The phone never stops ringing. It starts at 4 o’clock in the morning. Sandra LaDay is a one-woman charity machine.

“Hello? This is Sandra, yes,” she tells the person who phoned. “So if you need an electric heater you let me know, and I’ll start hustling for you one, ahead of time.”

Working out of her home and a former gas station she purchased for $700, LaDay created People Supporting People, a lifeline to anyone in need in Port Arthur, Texas.

“We get to feed so many people here because this is the poorest area of Port Arthur,” she says. “I know what they’re going through. It’s not easy being poor because we used to be so poor that we didn’t have no lights, water and gas. We had to go and borrow water three blocks from the house.”

Remarkably, LaDay and her husband, Willie, survive on his monthly disability check. Willie is battling cancer. But 10 years ago when Sandra LaDay decided to devote her life to helping the poor, it was her husband who built her a shelter. *

These are ordinary people living in the realm of possibility. 

What the world expects of you is as individual as your fingerprint. Only you can identify that call, and ask “What can I do”? We live in a very complex and broken world full of opportunities to pay it forward–full of impossible situations and opposition. Regardless of your status, influence, financial and economic standing, God calls you to your assignment with these words:

I was hungry and you fed Me, 
  
I was thirsty and you gave Me a drink, 
   
I was homeless and you gave Me a room, 
   
I was shivering and you gave Me clothes, 
   
I was sick and you stopped to visit, 
   
I was in prison and you came to Me. Matthew 25:33-35
and… I was a stranger, a foreigner, a widow, an orphan, and your came along side Me. Psalms 146: 3

What if everyone took the assignment THINK OF AN IDEA FOR WORLD CHANGE, AND PUT IT INTO ACTION?  What if we all paid it forward in 2009? I think we would all discover that one is a powerful number and that the realm of possibility is not so impossible after all.

*Stories excerpted from: The Early Show, “ Heroes Among Us: Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary things” by Tatiana Morales CBS News, 2005

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