Gold Star Thursday!

I don't know if this is going to be a recurring theme or not - we'll have to see if people really earn a gold star. I was thinking about the great healthcare debate that has taken over the country last night and tried very hard to boil it down to its core. Here's what I came to before exhaustion finally took me away.


The healthcare system is in a hurt because A) we are unhealthy people who don't even try to take care of ourselves until we are already sick. In other words, we are lazy and selfish. We eat and do what we want to because we want to. And B) because some doctors, clinics, hospitals and insurance companies only care about the bottom line and making it as big as possible. Please don't start the "doctors have student loans and have studied long and hard" argument. I understand that and I believe that they should be compensated. I just know that there are some out there who think they are entitled to more than is actually fair.


But at the bottom of both of those reasons sits the same root. Selfishness and Greed. I'm not resolving the healthcare issue today. As most of you know my brain grabs random ideas from time to time and takes me on a tangent completely unrelated. Well, the selfishness and greed grabbed me.


Then I read through some of the headlines online this morning. This story popped out to me.


Fashion-forward Miamian helps homeless land jobs


Here is a Product Director for Johnson & Johnson - a normal every day guy by most standards - who is taking money out of his own pocket to help homeless people change their lives. For the better.


Maybe he makes more money than us. Maybe he doesn't. The point is that he saw a need and stepped out of his comfort zone to fill it. He did something for someone else. And not just his next door neighbor who needed his grass mowed. He did something for an "undesirable." Someone who was probably passed by a million times a day in Miami.


I had no idea who Frank Kelly was. And don't Google him. You'll hear about a 50 year old man who was arrested for DWI in North Carolina. This is Frank. He's a motivational speaker who puts his money where his lessons are.


Is Frank going to cure the ills of the world? No. If we act like Frank are we going to cure the ills? No. Does that mean we shouldn't try? No.


Gold Star today for Frank. Gold Star to you if you take even two minutes today to step out of your comfort zone to help someone else. You may not radically change someone's life but you may make an impression that causes them to pass it on.