This wasn’t the post I had planned, and quite frankly, it may seem out of place amid my usual Taylor Swift and cookbook-ranking and candle-making fare. But it’s been weighing down on me, and where can I share it, if not on my own blog? So, here goes.

This week—no, this year—has felt heavy. Really, the heaviness started well before then, but it’s been a rumbling I’ve been able to hide from. Avoid. Distract myself from.

Because, if I’m being honest, I’ve done a lot of that. I’ve busied myself with the generic hum of business—scheduling multiple summer camps for the kids, with all of the dropoffs, pickups and label-anything-they’ll-touch that includes! Volunteering! The Sisyphean task of laundry, laundry, laundry—and it’s kept me from really absorbing or dealing with the bigger issues going on in the world. Plus, if I’m being honest, when I looked at the issues, I felt like nothing I did mattered. (Though it’s funny how Congresspeople will suddenly respond to you when you’re months away from an election.)

Gradually, I felt myself harden. I’ve become more skeptical and less trusting of people. As much as I believe that trust is given, not earned—and it only needs to be earned once it has been lost (a fool me once ideology, I suppose)—I haven’t been living that way lately.

Then I read CNN’s story about Peter Mutabazi, who—as a homeless 15-year-old in Uganda—planned on robbing a man who’d later change his life, all with a simple question: What’s your name?

He saw the teen approaching, and he took a genuine interest in him. At the time, Mutabazi, who had never slept on a mattress nor owned shoes and ran away from home at 10 out of fear his father was going to kill him, considered that simple question terrifying.

“Kindness meant danger,” he told CNN. “You’re trying to treat me like a human being, and that’s dangerous because I know you’re going to ask me for something I don’t want to give or you’re going to force me to give it to you.”

While living on the streets those past five years, he and other kids had gotten beaten by drunks “for sport” and had friends get killed or “disappear.” To survive, they turned to theft and prostitution.

A Life of Impact Starts Simply

Mutabazi lived in a garbage dump, and he called himself “Garbage Boy.” But that day, he shared his real name, Peter. The man, Jacques Masiko, shared some plantains with him. Over the next few months, they’d share food whenever Peter saw him, and he gradually opened up, discussing more of his life.

Eventually, Masiko enrolled Mutabazi in boarding school and had him move in with his family. He went on to graduate from a Ugandan university, then earned a degree in crisis management from London’s Oak Hill College. Now, he’s a senior child advocate at Christian aid organization World Vision.

But he’s far from the only person Masiko has helped over the years.

“He just gives,” Masiko’s son, Josh, told the news outlet. “He’s still paying school fees for people I don’t even know.”

In fact, when he was recently diagnosed with cancer and couldn’t afford treatment, “hundreds” of people he’d helped over the years came out to raise the funds for him.

What Inspired Such Generosity?

The story shares several examples of people he’s helped, and it held up a mirror to me, revealing how closed off I am. As much as I would like to be like him, I would immediately come up with excuses, wrapped in fears: If I welcomed a stranger into my home, could he or she hurt my children? Is this person trying to take advantage of me? What if they’re dangerous?

I don’t want to be naive or put my family in jeopardy, but how often do I cast a blind eye to someone in need or practice a “failure of kindness,” as George Saunders once shared, simply because it’d inconvenience me, feel awkward or because I’m too distracted by my own to-do list?

Masiko has lived by one principle, which has guided him in making a lasting impact: “He said the biggest investment you can make is not in…wealth and not in (material) stuff. It’s in people. If you invest in people, you can never go wrong.”

A little louder, so it really marinates into my hardened heart:

“He said the biggest investment you can make is…in people. If you invest in people, you can never go wrong.”

Josh Masiko, to CNN

This statement hit especially hard this week, as I’ve seen so many people at each other’s throats after the Charlie Kirk shooting. It is a tragedy, just as the Colorado high school shooting is, and the 301 other mass shootings have been this year. And it connects to journalist Liz Plank’s recent message on her Substack, Airplane Mode, titled “Charlie Kirk’s Death Won’t Heal Anything.”

“What I know for myself is that in moments like these, the only way forward is not with less empathy but with more. To take care of each other fiercely. To resist the pull to dehumanize. To hold fast to the values that made us speak out in the first place.

“Because if we abandon that, we have already lost.”

That’s it. That’s the thing I need to reconnect with—empathy. Showing up, connecting with others, resisting the urge to be silent, reserved, caught up in my own web of “busy” distractions that cause little failures of kindness and prevent me from living a life of true impact. (And yes, it’s not lost on me that my answer is empathy, a word Kirk has decried, though I would like to understand why he prefers sympathy, as the extended clip from Snopes on that topic reveals.)

So right now, my way forward is very simple: show up. Take an interest, even in the smallest of ways. You never know what it could lead to. I’d rather be a fool for trusting in humanity than closing myself off entirely.