GOOD DEEDS

No good deed goes unpunished.

We’ve all been there.  Right? 

For years, this has been a regular saying between my good buddy and me.  And for years, I thought how unfair that was.  And for years, she and I have proven the fact to be true.  When I first heard it, I thought “Really?”  That doesn’t sound right.  

Immediately I am reminded of the time when I was delivering a home cooked meal to an elderly widowed gentleman in our church.  I remember it was a fallish sort of day.  It was very hard to pull up his driveway because of the location and erosion so I parked next door at his son’s house.  There was a slight little hill I had to walk to get to the gentleman’s house.  On this particular day, the pine needles had really accumulated.  Here I go, bebopping along in my self-satisfaction of doing such a wonderful thing for someone who needed a lift.  I had the foil-covered delicious smelling food in my hands and my purse on my shoulder.  I start down the pine-straw covered incline and—you guessed it.  My feet slipped out from under me and down I went.  Hard.  My tailbone hurt like crazy and so did other parts of my body.  That ground might have been pine-straw covered but it was still hard.   Really hard.  As I dropped to the ground, I still had a sharp enough mind those years ago to protect that food so I held my arms out straight and held it tightly.  I actually had to sit there a minute as I even felt that my  head and brain goo had sloshed around, I hit so hard.  I managed to get myself up and put on a smile and delivered the food to the door to a very grateful man.  But…no good deed goes unpunished.  I hurt for days.  And days.  And days.

Many other times I have experienced the truth of this saying and I’m sure that you have as well.  This morning, though, I discovered something about that saying that I honestly never caught before.

I was doing my Bible reading and since lately I haven’t had any special thing to read, I just thought and said, “Hmmm, what shall I read today?”  At once, I thought “the Peters”.  So I began to read I Peter.  You will never guess what I found.  Or if you’re a more regular Bible reader than me, you might guess and be correct.  

I Peter 3:17 says “For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing.” 

Well, isn’t that a good one?  Suffer for well-doing.  And that is better.  Goes right along with “no good deed goes unpunished” if you stretch it just a bit.    I would imagine that suffering for a good deed is much better than suffering for an evil deed.   Or at least that is how I interpret.  I think that a guilty conscience can be a much worse suffering than a sore tailbone!  Hope I can just stick with the suffering for well doing rather than evil. 

I can’t wait to tell my good buddy what I found…but then maybe she knew it was there already. 

Guess I need to remember, too, that “pride goeth before a fall”.  ;-)   I just might elaborate on that in another post later on.  Look forward to it.