I am delighted to share with you that as of Friday afternoon, dd17 has found accommodations for sleeping for next year!

She will be staying with an older woman in the early stages of Alzheimers, and will receive a salary in addition to a room for her evening hours there.  When she called about this she was told there had been a lot of interest (usually with jobs like this, the work is in exchange for the room with no salary), with ten other applicants within the same hour she called.  Dd said it didn’t seem like a likely prospect for her because of the high demand, but I told her that if something is meant for her it doesn’t matter if there are another hundred applicants, and if it’s not meant for her it doesn’t matter if she’s the only applicant.

In short, they asked each applicant to send a short blurb about themselves and dd included references in her blurb.  They liked what they heard about her and asked to meet with her in Jerusalem on Thursday afternoon.  At that point they said she should be in touch on Friday after she had time to think about it, and offered her the job when she called back.  The adult children and the elderly woman herself all seem like very nice people and dd has a good feeling about the arrangement.  It is such a relief to know that she has a place to live – there are a number of details that we’re trying to take care of before she begins in another week and a half, but this was the biggest issue and resolving this has been really nice for us all.

I want to especially thank CBA, the blog reader who sent me a link to the job posting!  This was the first time in the years she’s been reading my blog that she has contacted me – she’s never contacted me privately and she was like most of you, anonymous and unknown to me.  But when I posted on Monday that we needed to find a place for dd17 to live for the coming year, she went out of her way to send me a private email with this information, rather than assume that I already knew about this job, or make another excuse for not reaching out.  So often we hear about a need someone has, we sympathetically cluck our tongues or say we’ll pray for them but we assume that someone the help will come from another direction and everything will work out without our intervention.  I’ve done it and I’m positive every one of you has sometimes responded like this as well.

The lesson that I’m taking for myself is, take a minute to really think about something when I hear about a need someone has, to really think if there’s a way that I can be of help.   I’m busy, really busy, and it’s hard to make the mental time but it doesn’t take time as much as it takes a willingness to make the headspace to briefly think about someone else.  It can be as small as giving someone a phone number they need and you have, or sending an email/ making a phone call on their behalf,   I was asked to help different people twice today  and helping each of them with something small for me but big for them, something I could have easily assumed someone else would help with since it’s not really such a big deal…. the sum total of my efforts for both situations was about about seven minutes.

Think if we each took on just one time a day or week to mentally make the effort to be of service to another, how many people could be helped.  Each of us has the potential to be the answer to a challenge that someone around us may be facing, so keep your mind and your heart open and ready!

Avivah