KAITLYN LEFTWICH
“Share a smile with other people and a smile will return to you.”
Life is all about the ups and downs, the roads taken and the roads never explored, and the experiences along the way that shape us into unique human beings. A few years ago, I was caught in one of life’s many losing battles, constantly getting beat up and thrown around until I was in a dark place that I thought I would never be released from. Fortunately for me, the saying “share a smile with other people and a smile will return to you” proved to be true. I went on a mission trip to Savannah, Georgia, for a week that ended up completely changing my life.
During this time I was at my personal lowest point, dealing with very bad problems of my own; however, little did I know, spending a week devoted to meeting the needs of others would also begin the process of restoring peace in my own life. Many church groups gathered for a week, sleeping on the floors of a church and waiting hours in line for a bitingly cold shower every night, but we all shared a common goal: to work as one unit and focus on others. When broken up and grouped randomly, I was blessed to be given a cluster of people who were all so different from one another because they all taught me so much. For a week, my group went to work on an elderly man’s house. We worked from sun-up to sun-down, fixing up the yard, repainting his house, and spending countless hours on a scorching rooftop completely repairing it in weather that felt as though we were in the middle of a desert. I remember how close I became with my fellow team members; we would spend hours opening up to each other and talking about our lives while pulling off shingles or hammering nails down on the roof. During our lunch break, the homeowner, who lived alone and had suffered from a few heart attacks already, would sit out on his porch to pray and eat with us as we all cracked jokes and got to know each other very well. The homeowner was a very lonely man and did not ever show a smile until the last day; it was on this day when he beamed at the sight of his freshly updated house. I realized while sitting among my new friends that the week was not only about repairing houses, it was about repairing the cracks and crevices that had taken shelter in our own hearts.
Every night when we returned to the host church, we would gather together for worship and share the day’s experiences with one another. Even when worship was over, there was a large gathering every night in the cafeteria where teenagers were playing instruments, singing, and worshipping into the night. I met a special friend of mine at these gatherings; he was always in the center. He was unique in his own way in the fact that he was born without arms or legs. He traveled to Savannah from his home state of Virginia to be a part of a mission trip where he was unable to do any laboring tasks. His job was to simply be positive, and positive he was. His heart of gold shone through like nothing I had ever seen before, and he opened my eyes to what the important things in life really are. His constant positivity is what helped jump start my effort to allow changes to be made in my own life that were necessary to reviving my own happiness.
I never imagined that a week away from home would alter my life for the better in the many ways that it did. While pouring sweat, dripping blood a few times, and shedding joyful tears, I realized that I was once again smiling and laughing the way that I used to. By opening my heart and arms in aid to others, they ended up patching up my own broken heart along the way.
LAWS OF LIFE 2013