What goes around, comes around.

I think there is such thing as a free gift.  However, very rarely does someone receive a free gift.  I say this because I would consider a free gift to be something that is given to someone by a person who has absolutely no expectations of receiving anything in return.  Unfortunately, we don't come across many people willing to do this.  

I would also consider kindness and love to be a free gift.  When someone loves someone else unconditionally, they often care for them despite maybe not receiving the same affection in return.  It is rare, too, to find someone who is kind to someone else because of unselfish reasons. Many times it seems as though people are kind to others in hopes of receiving some sort of recognition.  

More often than not, we read stories in the newspaper or hear stories on television of the horrible and selfish things people do.  Even as a child, these stories always made me so sad to think that people could be so evil to one another.

My mother told me a true story a few years ago that really (I know this sounds lame) gave me hope that there are still people out there that are kind and genuinely loving.  The story she told me is this: 

A man was driving down the highway on a cold and very rainy evening and saw an elderly woman pulled over to the side of the road due to a flat tire.  He pulled off the road to help her.  he cheerfully and efficiently changed her tire for her and gave her the number of a place where she could get the tire fixed.  The woman was very appreciative and insisted on giving him some money in return for his troubles.  The man told her that it was no trouble at all and to keep her money.  He told her the best way for her to pay him back was to do something kind for someone else.  The man left and the woman was very touched by his kindness.  On the way home, the woman stopped at a small diner to warm up and get something to eat.  Her waitress was a young, very sweet and happy,very pregnant woman.  The elderly woman could not stop thinking about what the man had said to her.  So when the woman finished her meal, she paid her bill, left her waitress a generous $100 tip, and left four additional one-hundred dollar bills on the table for the waitress.  The waitress went home later that night, grateful that now her and her husband could pay their rent and buy a crib for the new baby.  She explained to her husband, in tears, how kind it was of the elderly woman to leave her this money.  Little did the elderly woman know, the waitress was the wife of the man who had helped her earlier that morning.

The idea that this man had not asked for anything in return for his kindness, but in the end was still rewarded, solidifies the notion that the things we do, good or bad, will always find their way back to us.  

Free gifts are given to us when we, ourselves, are willing to give free gifts.  To me, this idea is almost comforting and I wish that more people really understood and cared to be sincerely, unselfishly kind.