Excerpt

Prologue

In the spring of 1993, I answered the phone in my study at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, South Carolina, where I served as minister at the time, only to find that by the time I returned the receiver to its cradle, my life was already shifting in a new direction.

The caller identified herself as Barbara Baco. She explained that on weekday mornings a nursing assistant came to their home to help her transfer Brian from his bed into his wheelchair. The assistant also helped return him to his bed each evening.

But insurance coverage did not reimburse the family for professional care on the weekends, so Barbara had been forced to turn instead to friends to negotiate the tricky transfer procedure each Saturday and Sunday. In the period immediately following Brian's injury friends and family had stepped in to lend a hand. But as the seventh anniversary of his accident approached, volunteers for that assignment had grown scarce, leaving Brian to face the unhappy prospect of being confined to his bed from Friday night until Monday morning each week.

Barbara's phone call was an appeal to our congregation for some weekend help. That she resorted to seeking the kindness of strangers demonstrated the magnitude of her desperation. Asked to explain what drew her to our church, she could only say that she had heard about us and had "a sense" we would be sympathetic.

I agreed to place an announcement in the church newsletter appealing for volunteers. But as I jotted down Barbara's phone number and address, the gesture seemed mostly obligatory, carried out without any real expectation her cause would attract any takers. With only about 140 members, out congregation was already plagued with more volunteer assignments than volunteers. Though the Baco's plight seemed very real, it was hard to generate much enthusiasm when I was already wrestling with a series of organizational holes to fill, each one worthy in its own right.

But when Barbara dictated directions to her house, a shudder of recognition ran through me. The location she pinpointed in a community of many square miles was to be found but a single block from an apartment that was to become my new home just two weeks later.

Barbara's request for help never found its way into the church newsletter. Within days, I called her back and volunteered myself for what seemed a very small act of kindness, little knowing all that it stood to teach me.

Four times each weekend I made the short walk to the small, uninspiring house on White Oak Street. The exterior of the Baco residence seemed as tired as its inhabitants. Nothing in my professional training or experience had prepared me for the dismal circumstances I discovered there - a severely disabled and bloated young man nearly twenty-three years old, living with his divorced, middle-aged mother. A huge, metallic hospital bed dominated the tiny living room, symbolic of the degree to which Brian's disability had come to dominate that family's life.