{"id":290818,"date":"2004-05-26T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-26T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/gestures-that-make-life-different\/"},"modified":"2024-05-13T20:36:53","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T18:36:53","slug":"gestures-that-make-life-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/gestures-that-make-life-different\/","title":{"rendered":"Gestures that make life different"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Like St. Martin did<\/strong><br \/> I am a young widow, with 3 children to raise and a shaky financial situation. My salary as a domestic helper was low. One day, as I was entering a church, I noticed a man who looked in distress. His trousers had patches. \u201cDear Lord, does this man need my help?\u201d I prayed. As I raised my eyes, I noticed a painting of St. Martin, and I knew that I did not have to wait for further signs: St. Martin never used half-measures in putting the commandment of evangelical love into practice. I approached the man. \u201cI\u2019ve just come out of the hospital and I am no longer fit to work,\u201d he told me. \u201cI find myself here, but to tell you the truth, I\u2019d rather step in front of a train and end it all.\u201d I tried to encourage him, saying, \u201cOf course you\u2019ve come to the right place. And you must keep coming back here. God will surely help you.\u201d I gave him what I had earned that day: 80 Swiss francs. The next day my uncle, whom I had not seen for 10 years, paid me an unexpected visit. It was a great joy for us to see each other again. When he was about to go, he handed me an envelope. It contained the sum of 8,000 Swiss francs!<\/p>\n<p>(M.M. \u2013 Switzerland)<\/p>\n<p><strong>At the public laundry<\/strong><br \/> Two days ago, I went to the public laundry with my washing. It was a sunny day and there were many women doing their laundry though the wash-house was quite small. We were chattering away when an elderly man who was half-blind arrived. He had a pair of bedsheets, a shirt and his turban to wash, and he asked us to move over a little to give him room. Nobody wanted to do it. Then I thought: \u201cJesus considers as done to him whatever we do or refuse to do for our brothers.\u201d So I said to the man: \u201cBaba (term of respect used to address the elderly), give me your laundry; I can do it for you!\u201d The other women started to laugh. \u201cAre you serious? With your big family and the mountain of washing you have?\u201d I repeated my offer to the man and started to wash his bedsheet. He was very happy; he gave me a fatherly blessing and before going, he left me a piece of soap which he had held onto for himself. This time nobody laughed. In the silence, something new had happened at the public laundry. One woman lent her basin to another, while another offered a pail of water to someone else who was farther off. A chain of love had begun!<\/p>\n<p>(F.V. \u2013 Pakistan)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Living witness<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290818\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}