I attend school at a private Christian university.   Recently, on a particularly ominous dark and chilly evening, I was taking a calculus test.

I think it’s a safe assumption to say that calculus, on average, is a stressful experience.  As I retired my anxious eraser and snapped my hoodie up to my chin, I was greeted just outside the building by a number of smiley people. 

“Did you just take a test?”  One girl asked me, with a little too much enthusiasm to befit conversations about math exams.

Hesitantly, I answered with the affirmative.  In a happy outburst they started to cheer and applaud and congratulate me.  I was confused.  But in a few quick words, they revealed their mission was just to encourage the test takers.  They handed me a cookie and I walked home with encouragement in my back pocket.

And that same week I was also struck with a phantom bed-maker.  I came home two nights to a bed made, nice and neat.  I stared at the flattened sheets quizzically and remembered that I had not done that that morning.  There was another do-gooder in my midst.

These small incidents made me realize something – how much power we have to brighten someone.  It’s the simple things in life:  A bed made, a “you did it!”, or a cookie.   How easy it is to deliver something so small. Yet maybe we spend too much time concerned about ourselves, forgetting that in a mere five minutes, we could change the course of someone’s rotten day. 

Thank you, random do-gooders, for teaching me that little lesson.  Now I’ll hand a warm cookie to someone too.