Paying it Forward

Today two men came to our house with a big truck and they took away most of our stuff. I wasn't too happy about that, but Laura said not to bark at them. She said that she had asked them to come.

Laura gave the men most of our furniture, our TV, VCR, DVD player, bar fridge and over half of her clothes. She gave them so much stuff they couldn't fit it all into their truck! Now our house is almost empty!

This is all part of Laura's Inverse Pay it Forward project.

You all know about Paying it Forward, right? If someone does something good for you, you can "pay back" the favour, "settle the score" so to speak, but that closes the cycle of goodness pretty quickly and all you have is two people who did something nice for one another. If, however, you turn around and find someone else to help, you "pay it forward", and they pay it forward and the person who they help pays it forward, etc. you create this huge chain of people doing good things which can spread all around the world and potentially make our world a better place for everybody!

Well, Laura has some very good people in her life who have done some very nice things for her, but Laura is a good person herself. She is pretty good at paying it forward. What happens, however, when someone does something bad to you?

You don't want to pay back the bad deed - doing so would make you just as bad as the person who hurt you - and you obviously don't want to pay forward something bad. Evil was introduced into the world by the bad deed and, if you believe as Laura does, that we must each one of us "Be the Change" that we want to see in the world, you yourself need to do something to try to counteract that evil.

What can you do?

As Laura and I recently learned, you can co-operate with the police and the Crown Attorney fully and still have no guarantee that the Crown will bring a criminal to justice. You cannot control anyone's behaviour but your own. You must Be the Change!

I ask again, what can YOU do to be that change?

Laura decided that one of the things she could do was not only to pay forward good deeds but also to try to counteract bad deeds with good ones. She made a commitment for the International Day of Peace last year that she would try to turn the tide of hatred into love by doing one good thing for someone for each time that something bad was done to her.

This has been a difficult commitment to fulfil because, as you may know, a lot of bad has happened to Laura in the last year as a result of the actions of Uber Creep. One of those bad things is that we have had to sell our home.

Now we have nowhere to keep most of our belongings and, instead of trying to sell them or rent a storage locker for them, Laura decided that she could implement an Inverse Pay it Forward plan by giving them away.

The men who took our stuff this morning will sell it to people who need it but cannot afford to pay for new stuff, and then they will give the profits from those sales to charity. That way, lots of people can be helped by us and Laura and I will be okay because we still have each other.