It’s An Honor, Mrs. McCall

For over a year now, my children and I have been visiting an elderly woman in a nearby nursing home once a week. My reasons: to teach my children how to communicate with older adults, even those who are not in good health, and to do something nice for someone else. Some visits have been good, more have been trying, but it’s worth it, I would say to myself.

After one very trying visit, where my five-year-old kept teasing my two-year-old and making him holler, and the older children kept looking at me saying, “When can we go?”, it finally struck me. My attitude and hence my children’s attitudes towards these visits were wrong. Our approach shouldn’t have been “We are doing this good thing for you, Mrs. McCall,” but rather “Mrs. McCall, it is a privilege to spend time with you. You have so much to share with us, and we are so blessed to have you in our lives.”

What if that is how we treated everyone we met, even the cashier in the store? What if we approached them as “It is an honor to do business with you, and I’m so glad I picked your check-out line”? What if, instead of looking annoyed or exasperated, we gave them a smile and wished them a nice day? What if we honored each member of our family, and then taught our children to do the same?

Now, if there’s anything I want my children to learn from our weekly visits to the nursing home, it’s that it’s an honor to know Mrs. McCall. Our visits are going much better now.