Tuesday☀️🙏🏻

Tuesday morning Diarmuid called my phone, just twenty four hours into his week long course helping him manage his debilitating stammer. Away from home in the company of strangers, he needed badly to pack it all in and return home. 

Disappointed for him, sad too that 700€ would be wasted (money scarce in those early days), I told him; ‘Many folk give up on a Tuesday. Weekend over and next weekend away off on the horizon. Tuesday is a tough day but if somehow you get through today, you are in with a fighting chance of lasting the course’. Turns out he did just that!!

Seventeen years on, Diarmuid thanks God and all concerned, for super skills gleaned in ‘Stammer Camp’ (as we jokingly called it) in that time of trial in his young life. Today, he owns his stammer, (it did not miraculously disappear), but in no way is it a hindrance to the wordsmith that he is. Far from it!

Only now, with the passage of time, do I fully realise the enormity of his task at hand back then and how utterly amazing he was to go through with it. He could so easily have dropped out and I would have totally understood. How glad I am that he did not though. For sure he is too.

Then, last evening, lady calls my phone in floods of tears, (on a Tuesday too). Dublin too big, too scary, she will return home tomorrow and search for work in another place. 

Grasping at straws, stuck for words of encouragement, when suddenly Diarmuid’s testing tale of triumph danced into my mind, changing everything for poor lady. Her sobbing stopped as she began to rethink her rash decision.

Imagine that! Seventeen long years come and gone, and another poor soul finds solace and direction all because a young guy called Diarmuid somehow found the strength within, to keep right on to the end of the road.

Every tiny thing we do in life has consequences. In the economy of salvation nothing is wasted.

‘A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job’. (Michael Larsen)