Churches, home-improvement and grocery stores, and perfect strangers housed stranded motorists last week as unexpected snow rocked the South. Hotels opened their lobbies when no vacancies remained.

Truckers welcomed drivers into their cabs for warmth when cars, stalled for hours in traffic, ran out of gas. Teachers spent the night with students in schools when buses and parents couldn’t get them home.

The insensitive or uninformed may mock us for the chaos that ensued for what seems like a modest amount of snow (and question why we and our local governments don’t invest in equipment and supplies we rarely need for events like this), but then you’d miss the beauty that even snow and ice can’t bury:

While Southerners may not have shown off their foul-weather driving skills, they certainly showed off their big hearts.

Tragedy breeds everyday heroes: the policeman who delivers a baby on a gridlocked interstate; the couple who leaves the warmth of home on foot to deliver food and water to the stranded; the principal who remains overnight and plays bingo with a handful of students who can’t get home; families who welcome strangers into spare bedrooms for the night.

A crisis separates the well-intentioned from those who take action.

It doesn’t take a snowstorm, a tornado, or a hurricane to find needs you can fill. My husband spent four days in the hospital last month. The day he came home, my friend Cindy sent a text: Dawn, I’d like to bring over a big pot of soup for y’all tonight if that would help.

Did it ever! It was the nicest thing she could have done. I’d spent four days and nights sitting in the hospital with my husband (who’s fine, by the way), and we all needed a home-cooked meal.

Two weeks ago Cindy’s father had open heart surgery and he didn’t respond well to anesthesia or his medications. It’s rough on the whole family. When he leaves the hospital, he’ll stay with my friend and her family for six weeks of recovery.

To Cindy—who’s trying to take care of her daddy, her family, and direct a one-day-a-week private homeschool program—this probably feels like a 17-car pileup on I-285. Another friend coordinated a meal schedule through Take Them a Meal and I had the chance to return Cindy’s favor by delivering a pot of soup to her home.

Most people won’t tell you what they need. Maybe they’re too overwhelmed to think about it or maybe they don’t want to impose on you, even if you ask what you can do to help. Just do something. Offer to take your friend a meal; to watch her kids; to drive her to the hard appointments. Whatever she needs.

How can you be an everyday hero today?

{Find your February desktop calendar here.}

by Dawn Camp, My Home Sweet Home

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