Every Sandwich, Every Sunday, Every Seat at the Table…Matters.

When I was nine years old,
sitting in a Grade 4 classroom with a lined notebook and a freshly sharpened pencil,
my teacher, Mr. Kressler, asked us to write a story:
“If I could change the world.”

Most of my classmates grinned wide and leaned in,
ready to write about inventions and robots
and space travel
and saving the environment
and becoming world leaders
to end all wars.

Big ideas.
Big moves.
Big changes.

But I heard the question differently.

“If I could change the world.”

Me.
Just me.
A nine-year-old kid
with a sandwich and an apple and some cookies in her lunchbox and soft knees from summer scrapes.

So I wrote a different kind of story.

In mine, there was a boy, alone without any lunch,
hungry and sad and invisible.

And I sat beside him.
I shared my lunch.
That’s it.
That’s all.

No technology. No politics.
Just two kids. And a sandwich.

When it came time to share our stories, I felt my throat tighten.
My heart beat fast. Shame crept in like a shadow.

Everyone else had changed the world with explosions of brilliance.
I had only… sat beside someone.

I ran out into the hallway and cried. Embarrassed.
Because I thought I had gotten it all wrong.

But then, Mr. Kressler followed me.
Crouched down beside me.
Looked me in the eyes and said,

“Maybe sitting with someone and sharing what you have
is the best way to change the world.”

That moment changed me.

And I’ve carried it ever since.

I carried it when my wife and daughter made sandwiches for strangers
who live in tents and doorways with stories no one listens to.
I heard my daughter talk about them not as “the homeless”
but as people, with names, and laughs, and eyes that lit up when someone saw them.

I carried it into every Sunday dinner in our tiny first home
where the table was too small but the welcome was wide.
Fifteen… twenty people on folding chairs and couches and on the floor at the coffee table,
eating like family. Because sometimes family isn’t blood.
It’s who makes room for you.

I carry it still.

This belief. That sitting beside someone, offering what you have, matters.

That changing the world doesn’t always look like a speech or a protest or a Nobel Prize.

Sometimes it looks like a bowl of soup.
A place to sit.
A moment of being seen.

In our family, we believe:
When you have more than you need,
you don’t build a higher fence.
You build a bigger table.

And that’s what we’re doing.
One chair at a time.
One story at a time.
One sandwich, one Sunday, one soul at a time.

That’s how we’re changing the world.

And maybe…that’s how we always have.