I’ve been struggling to write today. I knew what I wanted to share with you but given that my aim is to use this space to lift your spirits and share charity type stuff at the same time, starting was difficult.

Two days before Christmas, my maternal grandmother died. (You see why I struggled to start? How do you write that in a heart lifting way?!) She was a big supporter of Give A Brick and would talk of looking forward to visiting the new facilities once the first project at Cross Hands was complete.

Given that the older generation have a reputation for being a bit slow around certain technologies, it was always encouraging that she ‘got’ Give A Brick even if we hadn’t yet lured her on to Twitter

What was it that captured my 83 year old grandmother to such an extent that we felt compelled to request donations to Give A Brick in lieu of flowers at her funeral? After all, she always loved flowers too

You can read more about the specifics of the first project if you click here but Give A Brick is more than just one project. It is this wider vision of what Give A Brick is about that I suspect inspired my nan.

Allow me to introduce you to a young lady we’ll call Jill. She was 15 when I met her. She sat at the front on her own. She kept her head down and struggled to make eye contact. Her hair was unkempt and had what looked liked lice eggs in it.

The other folks in the class didn’t speak to her other than to snigger before whispering to their friends. With just days until school closed for the holidays, the class had no work to do. Instead they just chatted amongst themselves but this escalated the problem for Jill.

I sat with her and found we had a lot in common. She is one of lots of siblings and her home is always noisy. But unlike me, she didn’t have her own room to escape to when it all got too much. I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember a lot of what we talked about but I remember her smile. When she smiled her eyes danced and sparkled.

And then there was a girl we’ll call Sally. She wore a voodoo doll around her neck to accompany her angry snarl. She and I parted company that day when she expressed herself with what our Welsh speaking friends like to call ‘iaith glas’ (blue language). The usual punishment would be exclusion from school but it was deemed safer for her to be given in-school exclusion rather than keep her at home for several days.

And finally, there’s the young mum who I see traipsing past my window every day whilst half dragging her harness enclosed toddler. I said hello to her once but she wasn’t keen to make conversation.

If I had a time machine and could transport you, me and those three ladies back to Palestine in the year AD30 we’d meet a chap who would make us feel like we were the most important, most loved and most special people ever born. Organised religion has done much to tinker with his reputation over the ensuing 2000 years but his love is still visible today.

The goal of Give A Brick is to love those ladies, and other people like them, as the special and unique individuals they are. I have a passion to change the world but it can only be done one brick at a time or in the words of ‘God’ in the film Evan Almighty, one act of random kindness at a time. Jesus gave us the ‘why’ and it’s projects like our first one that provide us with the ‘how’.

photo credit: BinaryApe

Tagged as: act, kindness, random