"From The Heart..."

What do Jamie Lynn Spears and Rodger Clemens have in common? They are two pseudo-celebrities du jour who in their respective 16 and 46 years of residing among us have contributed nothing of lasting substance to the betterment of mankind as a whole. The older throws a baseball arguably more proficiently than anyone else in the history of the game and derives an insane amount of compensation and public acclaim for doing so. The younger's link to notoriety is that she is sibling to sister Britney (sadly and pathetically infamous in her own right) who determined that the best means to influence impressionable and gullible youth who worship blindly at her misguided alter of fame would be to spread her legs and become pregnant. The media of very stripe is literally hemorrhaging with nonstop, wall-to-wall coverage of these two latest examples of popular American Idols in order to feed the public's shallow adulation of and addiction to celebrity. Neither is worth the ink it requires to print their petty and trivial sad stories.

So...who is the young man featured in the photograph above? His name is Johnny. He is 19 years of age. He has downs syndrome and he works as a bagger in a super market. Johnny will never be elevated by the star-starved media to the heights of pop icon because he has no Hall of Fame athletic abilities, nor does he possess celebrity status as a headline performer. He just bags groceries. But because he cares that he does so to the very best of his ability and by doing so he had discovered a way to impact his sphere of influence for the betterment of all who come into contact with him on a daily biasis. See his story by clicking on the WEB link below:

http://www.stservicemovie.com/

Greek philosopher Pericles penned, "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lies of others." Impacting one's world for the good does not require unique talents nor a pedigree of ancestral service. It only requires a desire to do so...a heart to do so. Kindness is not a disease, but it is contagious. Johnny the bagger caught the spirit of reaching out to others, spreading it with a pure heart, and by doing so he touched the hearts of dozens of others with his infectious spirit. Our world can do with far less adolation of pompous and arrogant prima donnas who have no light unless it is in the limelight and far more recognition and limelighting of nobodies like Johnny. They're out there. They are all around us. They are you and me. It all starts from the heart.