We All Have Heroes in Our Lives

National Public Radio has an ongoing quest to find stories of “Unsung Heroes,” which I would summarize as people who magically occur in others’ lives and make an amazingly positive impact.  NPR, as usual, puts it better, because they’re better writers than I could ever hope to be: “People who made a warm connection on an otherwise cold day.”

Linked above is one that my wife and I happened to have tripped across on the way to the grocery store the other day. I hope you’ll take two minutes and check it out; I know you’ll be as blown away as we were.

We all have stories like this in our lives, though maybe they happened in moments when we, in our frantic pursuit of what we desperately hoped was to come for us next, let them inadvertently fly past, completely unnoticed.

Here’s one of mine: When I was in high school, I had a friend two years older. He was tall and athletic, a fantastic rock guitarist, a totally effortless chick magnet like none of my other friends had ever seen, and patiently taught me to drive a stick shift.  By contrast, I was a shortish nerd, wearing heavy black plastic glasses, taking classical piano lessons, a guy who drew virtually no looks from pretty girls.