We Were Strangers Once

I'm overwhelmed by the generosity of strangers in my life lately. At some point in my life, I believed that I was the only person in the entire world who actually wanted to help random people. That would have made me a narcissist.

Suddenly, my world has opened to the beauty of strangers: people who open up their hearts and their lives to include you in it. The strangers who are just unknown friends at the time. Here's the three types of strangers I've met in the last few months:

The Person Who is Great at Customer Service

This is the person who loves serving others and will go the extra mile to make sure you're a happy customer. I've encountered this twice when I've been planning out my wedding. The first was when I ordered some special pans to help my uncles better serve food to my guests. The lady mis-calculated the shipping cost for me, and instead of asking for more money, told me it was her mistake, and agreed to give me the order $50 short of what it should have been. The second incident occured when I wanted to order a whole lot of syrup and just casually emailled the company to ask if I could get a bulk shipment. They offered me a discount on the syrup at half the price it was in store - even for their more expensive syrup!

The $200 Random Donation

Recently, the love of my life supported the Greater Edmonton Animal Rescue Society, which I volunteer for, by playing video games for 24 hours to raise funds for some much-needed vet appointments for orphaned animals. I casually threw out an email to everyone I knew that wasn't on my Facebook friends list, including my soccer team which I had played a one hour game with once a week for the last six weeks. I barely knew my team mates, and had only spoken to them about the sport of soccer. Yet, one of my team mates took the liberty of sharing my email with her work office and rounded up $205 for my charity, and I was so incredibly humbled, I think I said "thank you" about 100 times. A complete stranger had donated a matching amount of money to the cause as we had raised from long time friends alone (not that I'm disappointed - most of those long time friends donated what they could, and I'm grateful for it).

The Wedding Videographer

Okay, this is the one that made me cry. During the same 24 hour video game marathon, I managed to bond with another volunteer from the animal rescue. However, I had met this person face-to-face for a thirty second conversation in a volunteer meeting, and was only friends with her through Facebook. She asked me about the wedding, and I had mentioned I didn't hire a photographer or videographer because the price was just simply too high. What happened next still brings me to tears. This amazing individual offered to video tape my wedding for us for FREE - and insisted that it was something she wanted to do. I couldn't even say no. She already decided she was coming with a video camera in tow. So now I have a wedding videographer and I will cry the entire time she's video taping me.



Strangers are the best kind of people. I've always thrived at a party where I know nobody. I never could figure out why. I think I know now. When you know somebody inside and out, it's a lot harder to act the way you want humanity to be. When you get to "test" out how people will react to a world you want to create, it's a lot eaiser to be a good person, without expectations or wondering what your friend who knows you as "standoffish" is going to think.

That, or I've just finally hit the gold mine where good people actually exist. Or I'm less of a narcissist.