Geodes

 Have you ever had an encounter with someone who just makes your day because of a smile? Because she can tell you're in a hurry and lets you go ahead of her in line? Because your arms are full and he opens the door for you? A seemingly small act of kindness can make our day. 

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Dana Haight Cattani talks about discovering geodes when she and her family moved to the Midwest. Her son’s friend showed her a geode and said, “See the crystals?”

“Sure enough. The rough, dull-colored rock had been split, perhaps by the freeze-thaw cycle of too many Midwest winters, and in the hollow were beautiful crystal formations. Before coming to Indiana, I had never seen anything quite like it. It was a hidden treasure, and it was right in my backyard.” 

Then she talks about the geodes, the hidden treasures, she finds in the people in her new town. 

At the post office -  “An older gentleman with a dapper white moustache often waits on me there. One morning as he weighed my packages, he said, “I’m in a good mood; I have meatloaf for lunch today.” I smiled and said something affirming. He took this as encouragement and said, “I love meatloaf. My wife doesn’t like it, so she makes it just for me. And the next day, I get the leftovers for lunch.” From that moment, he was endeared to me as one who appreciates small pleasures—like cold meatloaf—and the bigger ones, like a wife who cooks for him and sometimes fills his wishes at the expense of her own. …I let other people go ahead of me in line just so I can go to his window. When I hand him the money I owe, I feel I have brushed against deep contentment, and I carry some of that gold dust away on my fingertips.”

Isn't it wonderful when we meet someone and can feel her "deep contentment?" The "gold dust" from such experiences brightens our whole beings. 

Catani's son’s sixth-grade class did a physics activity that involved designing a container that would cushion a raw egg when it was dropped from the top of a fire truck, seven stories high. Paul was the firefighter dropping the cushioned eggs.  Paul carefully made “certain the all-important parachute deployed.” Paul also coached her son’s baseball team. “He is a human geode, ordinary in every way but one: his core is full of hidden treasure, unexpected and without price. I always cheer loudly for his son at baseball games.”

Cattani then talks about the Lord touching us in a way that encourages us to reach out and serve others, thereby showing the crystals, the divine sparkle, hiding beneath our ordinary looking exteriors. 

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Hidden Treasures, by Dana Haight Cattani; Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 43, no. 3 (Fall 2010); p 221-226

*free image from pixabay