North Platte Canteen
By December 1941 the east-west rail lines across the United States were filled with troop trains. A small group of citizens in the little village of North Platte, Nebraska, took note of this fact and decided to try to do something for all these servicemen passing through their town. On Christmas Day the first team of five volunteers waited at the depot with baskets of sandwiches and little bottles of cold milk. During the ten-minute stop, they moved along the train passing out these treats to the hungry and appreciative men crowded into the cars. Soon the whole town and surrounding region were involved in supporting the North Platte Canteen, which became famous for this unusual and unexpected hospitality. For the duration of the war, the little town of twelve thousand fed hundreds of thousands of troops passing through without the benefit of government aid and in spite of food shortages and rationing.
One of the women who worked in the Canteen from the beginning was Elaine Wright. Her husband was a railroad employee, and her son was in the Navy. One day word spread throughout North Platte that Elaine had received the dreaded telegram informing her and her husband that their son had been killed in action. No one saw her for several days, until one morning she walked into the Canteen. There was a long and uncomfortable silence, as no one knew what to say to her. She finally said to them: “I can’t help my son, but I can help someone else’s son.”314
Some wise person once said, “You can be bitter, or you can be better.” Elaine Wright epitomized the “better” approach to dealing with grief. There is no more effective way to soothe your own pain than doing something for someone else. Seeking a higher purpose in service to others is the surest way to move beyond yourself and your grief.
Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.
—Philippians 2:57