Sometimes the language we use when speaking or writing about things is pretty abstract. It’s always good to give more life, more substance, to your story by citing examples or giving more detail.
I talk about compassion a lot here on the site, talk about how urgent it is and so on.
Because you’re reading this, no doubt you’re on-board with that idea that compassion and acting compassionately are very important.
It wouldn’t be a bad thing to come up with a really good, a really clear example of someone acting compassionately.
Here we go: last Saturday night, Hanna Pignato, a waitress at the Joe’s Crab Shack on the Daytona Beach Pier noticed that a young swimmer in the ocean beneath her restaurant was struggling in a rip current.
Most folks would have hollered for a life guard or dialed 9-1-1.
Not Hanna. She gave her apron and wallet to a colleague and jumped into the sea.
Unfortunately for this hero, she hit a sandbar and broke her foot and fractured three vertebrae.
The swimmer was pulled to safety by someone else and Hanna was barely able to swim back to shore safely.
But the overarching fact here is that she put it all on the line. She acted compassionately, to say the least, when the limit of most folks’ compassion would have been to feel intensely sad if the boy had not ultimately been saved from the rip current.
Hanna is a hero. Her ennobling act of compassion stuns and inspires me.
Needless to say, her medical expenses are considerable. And her apartment is on the third floor so this is a big deal.
If you’re able to help Hanna, I hope you will. Click on this if you’d like to know how you can help.
Brother Ben
© 2019 The Fellowship of St Francis, Inc.
The Fellowship of St Francis 