The Good Book says you’re supposed to love your neighbor as yourself. It also says you ought to treat people like you’d won’t them to treat you. Says that in Leviticus and in Matthew and that’s the way people taught it and practiced it when I was growing up in Red Bud.

A lot of people don’t know their neighbors today, even the ones living right beside them, but in that time and place, in 1970 something, we knew everyone within twenty miles and considered them neighbors so the Good Book instructions applied.

I learned a lesson on that night, a lesson that stuck even in my young mind. I must have been no more than eight or nine years old when it happened. At that time everyone heated their homes with wood stoves or fireplaces. It was a late fall evening about dusk when someone came running into Momma’s store and said, “so and so’s house is on fire,” and the siren call was put out over the telephone wire to every family around. 

It was a family that lived about two miles down the road toward Red Bud. They lived in an old farm house and the blaze had almost certainly started from a fire lit to take the chill out of the cool fall air. “They was poor people,” Momma said. “And they had five or six kids,” she added. Calling them poor was like the pot calling the kettle black, but even poor had degrees when I was a boy.

Momma closed the store and we went to the house where she began going through all of our drawers pulling out select clothes. When she finished with the chest of drawers she moved to the closets. Finally, she was satisfied with several grocery bags of clothes so we got in the car and headed for the fire. When we arrived there were cars parked on the side of the road for a quarter mile in each direction.

The fire department was finishing putting what was left of the fire out. The old wooden farm house had burned quickly taking everything they owned with it. What I witnessed next I have never forgotten. Neighbors, just like us, lined up with bags and boxes of clothes, winter coats, and blankets, canned food and jugs of water to give to that family. The man stood with his arm around his wife who sobbed while children clung to her legs. They watched what few material possessions they owned smolder in front of them.

I was certainly saddened by this site but it was those that lined up to give what they did not have that struck me. I knew the families that were giving winter coats which they planned to hand down to their next child to a family who had a need now. They gave homemade blankets that had been in their families for generations. The people giving had very little of their own to part with – yet they gave. We made our way up to that family. Momma handed them the bags, gave the woman a hug and told them how sorry we were. I had certainly never felt better about myself to that point in my life.

I saw conviction that night, conviction in the hearts of good people that knew that they were doing the right thing even if it hurt a little to give. It felt good to help those people, real good, and if it made you feel that good then the Good Book must be true.