I had just logged into my work computer one morning this week when my phone rang.
The screen said the call was coming from my daughter’s school.
I thought that maybe a teacher wanted to speak with me; we’re in course selection season for next year, and my daughter’s been going back and forth on a few things, trying to get as much of what she wants as she can in a limited school day.
Nope. When I answered, it was my daughter. “I think my phone was stolen out of the gym locker room,” she said, explaining the call from the office phone.
Spoiler alert: Her phone wasn’t stolen. It was misplaced, in her locker, hidden under some other things. It also was apparently turned off, since the last location I could find for it on my phone was the school parking lot.
That’s not really the point, though. The point is that my husband and I put on our coats and drove through the snow to see if it was in the parking lot. Maybe she’d dropped it on the way into school? Maybe someone did take it from the locker room and dropped it as they left the school? Even if it seemed more likely that even if someone had taken it, they had just turned it off in the parking lot.
When she called, we immediately did what we could to help. We were standing there, in the parking lot, kicking aside the snow, when she texted that her phone was found and all was well.
It made me think about whose calls for help I respond to, immediately and without thinking. My husband, obviously. My kids, no matter how old they are. I would — I have — flown across the country at a moment’s notice when they needed me.
Other members of our families? Sure, if I think there’s something I can do. Sometimes there’s not, or I can’t get there because of other commitments. Friends? The same. Strangers? If it’s not too much trouble.
This is clearly not to congratulate myself. We are called to welcome the stranger, to define “neighbor” as those people whom we can be of service to, no matter where they are from, what they look like, what language they speak, how they do or do not worship, and I know I am falling short.
I’d like to defend myself by saying I think most people fall short; otherwise, the world would not be in the state that it is. And at least I try not to actually hurt anyone else. But other people’s shortcomings, real or imagined, are not mine to judge, and what other people do or don’t do does not relieve me of the obligation to love my neighbor as myself, following the road map provided in Matthew 25, which lists the corporal works of mercy.
Not all calls for help come from a family member’s phone, and no single one of us can do everything. But all of us can do something.