While rummaging through a small box of miscellaneous mementos, I came across a small rock. The rock is without note; its color and texture are like millions of other rocks found along the gravel roads back at the farm. I am not a rock collector, but even if I were, this would not likely have made the cut. There was nothing special about this rock.
Except for one thing.
My nephew gave it to me when he was four.
We’d been out for a walk along the road and he reached down and handed it to me.
“Here’s a rock,” he said. “You keep it.”
I have other such things — sea shells found on beaches that are unspectacular in every way, or maybe a leaf I pressed between book pages and dried. Nothing of note or importance, except for the very fact that I saved them for some reason.
By picking that particular rock out of any of the thousands around us, my nephew made that rock valuable. It became special, of worth, for the simple reason that it was saved. By no quality of its own — not its color or appearance or location or anything the rock could do — the rock was now elevated beyond its lowly status of road covering, sitting instead in my box bringing to mind a memory of my nephew and a good day.
I think of this whenever I am tempted to brush someone off, wanting to ignore and not bother with the work inherent in getting involved in the life of another. I forget the value of investing my own life in someone else’s life. I can’t “save” a person, I can’t change a person on purpose, but the act of pulling someone out of the background by sincere action is a form of what I’m thinking of with the rock.
By being saved, we are made valuable.
