Coming full circle …
There are days when you feel unappreciated, when your best effort doesn’t seem good enough and perhaps no one really cares what you do or say.
Well, I haven’t had one of those days — I’ve had one of those years.
That is until Sister Barbara Joseph Foley called me to say the family of Stephen Beachboard would be visiting Oklahoma City the next day.
Would I like to be a part of her first meeting with them?, she asked.
Of course!
I remembered the initial story I wrote about Sister Barbara and her determined efforts to hold a funeral service for the homeless man. That story chronicled her successful quest to see him buried at Resurrection Memorial Cemetery (thanks to the cemetery’s generosity).
Driving to Foley’s food pantry for the homeless, I had no idea how this new chapter of the story would impact my heart.
I was truly touched.
Like many reporters, I write a story then go on to the next one and the next one and the next one …
You write so many and they all impact you in one way or another. However, you go on and you write another one, and another one and another one and so on …
Listening as Sara Beachboard talked of Googling for information about her long lost brother-in-law, it suddenly occurred to me that she had found the story I had written about his death and subsequent burial on the Internet. I think Sister Barbara alluded to that during her phone call, but I didn’t understand what she had been saying.
I wept thinking about what finding that story initially must have been like for Sara Beachboard and her husband, Jim. Then I wept when I thought about all the stories that I didn’t get to share with readers that week of 2007 and how that one that made it into the newspaper had brought the Beachboard family some closure.
After their visit, Sister Barbara said she felt the Beachboards left Oklahoma City with a sense of peace. They got to meet the woman who had befriended their relative and learn that though he was homeless, he had many people who cared about him.
He resisted their efforts to get him off the streets, but he did open up to many of his Oklahoma friends, showing them his writings and acceping the coffee they brought him — only if it had six Irish creamers and six vanilla creamers to go in it.
As the Beachboards and Sister Barbara looked at old photographs of Stephen Beachboard and swapped stories about him, I had to put down my pen and my video camera more than once.
They were not the only ones who had come full circle.
Sometimes we may never know how what we do or say influences or touches others. When we do get to see how a kind word, a good deed or a story results in something worthwhile, I think it is a divine treat.
That day, as I came away from Sister B.J.’s pantry, I felt that someone knew exactly what I needed at that particular moment of my life.
And I also knew that Jim Beachboard’s words would remain with me long after he had come and gone.
“People have to understand that everyone out there has a story,” he said.
This I know to be true.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Coincidentially, I subscribe to Beliefnet’s Prayer of the Day e-letter and Friday’s prayer was a Prayer for the Homeless. This week my awareness of the needs and challenges of the homeless has been heightened. Maybe yours has too.
Read the prayer by clicking here: Prayer for the Homeless.
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