The deed is officially done. The school shopping has been completed. It will be my last year to take Daniel school shopping for his K-12 education. He will begin his senior year in just over a week. We found bargains at Ross, Kohls, and Target. And we had a blast. The final stop of the day was at Rack Room Shoes.
I like the buy one, get one half off deal. It gives me a good excuse to buy a pair shoes when the boys need some. This year’s experience was slightly unique.

The lady asked me if I would like to donate toward a fund they were managing to purchase needy children shoes for school. Little did she know that pushing the shoes button with me was not such a bad idea… My mind immediately raced to a conversation I had with my dad when I was about 10 or 1l years old.

My paternal grandfather died very suddenly, when he was 36 years old from an infection. My father, the youngest of three children, was almost three years old.
My grandmother proceeded to complete her college degree at the University of Georgia. In 1934, she packed her three children up and moved from Georgia to the mountains of Kentucky. She joined her brother-in-law as a faculty member at Stuart Robinson School in Blackey, KY. Stuart Robinson was a boarding school for very poor mountain children. Letcher County Kentucky at that time had no public schools. The Presbyterian church supported this mission effort to touch these kids in desperate need of an education.

My father received his education at Stuart Robinson. His mother taught home economics and later served as principal for the school. When I was growing up, he shared very little about his years at Stuart Robinson. There was however, one exception. And that story involved shoes of all things…

A non-boarding student showed up at school one day barefooted. His family could not afford shoes. My dad made this confession to me: “I laughed at that kid, because he had no shoes. And he never came back to school again.” My father was still deeply troubled by his actions decades after the event occurred.
I know that he was trying to make an impression on me. It worked! I have not forgotten the conversation. The lady at Rack Room had no clue that she hit the jack pot when she asked me to contribute today to a fund to purchase shoes for needy children!

I hope all of us will think carefully today before we laugh. Let us choose our words cautiously. We never know what kind of permanent damage we could potentially incur. We also have no clue as to the effect that our actions will have in our own lives.