Ones own set of values

There are few things better than a good old chin-wag (conversation, to those of a younger dispensation) and I have just emerged from one now having spent the last hour chatting to a couple young charity workers collecting for disabled children. Some how the willingness to be open and communicative is sparked by a unseen connection, an assumption that these two people are good people, interesting people who have a story to tell but a story as much about themselves as about the charity they represent. We all should feel the need to find common ground, even if this common ground is based  on quite differing views.
The Seventh Day Adventist is a case in point. Along with people like Mormons they represent a faith based story which they feel is their duty to tell, a story when told to an Atheist like myself means little and could be construed by me as so far fetched that they are indulging in a fairy story. But its not the fairy story that is important its human story behind willingness to spend their day facing rejection and sometimes down right hostility but always with what I presume is understanding. Where do those inner reserves of warmth and humanity come from particularly in a world empty of much care and consideration for others. They act as a contrast to the banal and the crude events we see around us every day. They give one hope that the human capacity for things outside our everyday experience, things which don't immediately impinge on our lifestyle or the god of consumerism, are worthy of our time and that giving a little time, 'we' become the beneficiaries.
The two young people today were doing a job but it seemed to be a job they believed in and so the conversation drifted about between the charities aims and there own aims and background which had drawn them to be sitting on a chair in my house.
From the Ukraine to the Scottish Islands their stories were encouragingly wholesome. One from a society still engaged in venerating the family and generational values, that recognises the importance of experience with its tale to tell. The other brought up, well away from the hurly burly of city life, having to exist in an environment of sparse interconnectivity between people, and yet a people with their feet firmly on the ground, contesting life's daily problems with a good dose of practical common sense in which one had to grow up and evaluate ones own own set of values.

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