No doubt you’ve seen or heard about one of the most beloved movies of this holiday time, if not of all time: It’s a Wonderful Life, released in 1946 but reliably re-rerun every year since.
It’s the story of George Bailey of Bedford Falls, New York. As a young man he’d harbored big dreams for his life – college, a round-the-world trip, an important career – all of which are put on hold when his father dies from a stroke and George has to take over the family savings and loan business, running it with his uncle Billy.
George marries Mary, has children and hands over his precious tuition savings to his younger brother, Harry, to go to university in his stead, with the understanding that Harry will take over the family business when he returns home.
After his uncle loses the equivalent of about $140,000 of the bank’s money and with the prospects of scandal and ruin, George, furious at the circumstances that have trapped him in Bedford Halls, and believing he is worth more dead than alive via his life insurance, heads to the bridge over the town’s river and prepares to jump.
Before he can, Clarence, an angel in training, dives into the river, and George instinctively rushes in to rescue him. When George cries out that he never should have been born, Clarence takes him on a Scrooge-like journey, showing him what Bedford Falls would have been like without him.
His brother Harry would have died as a child without George, who saved him from drowning in a frozen pond. His uncle would have been institutionalized without his taking over the business; the local pharmacist would have been jailed without George to have caught his prescription mistake. His wife, who’d loved George from the moment they met, would ended up unmarried and alone, and his children would never have been born.
George returns home, only to find that the townspeople have pooled together more than enough funds to replace the lost money. Harry toasts George as the “richest man in town,” and Clarence sends him a little message via a Christmas present: “Remember: no man is a failure who has friends.”
It’s a Wonderful Life came to mind last week when Bryan and I received a raft of letters from a variety of long-term What Doctors Don’t Tell You subscribers. Early on in the 36-year history of What Doctors Don’t Tell You, we were struggling to make it work and appealed to our subscribers for help. We offered them a lifetime’s subscription, meaning that they’d never have to pay for the magazine or any subsidiary publications, if they paid us what amounted to about £300.
More than 500 took us up on it and their contributions truly helped to keep us going.
Little did we reckon that we’d still be publishing all these decades later, or running a full-color magazine, or even dealing with vastly inflated print and postal costs.
Recently, we wrote them to ask if they would kindly donate some money to pay for ballooning increases in print and postage.
Here’s just a small sample of what we got back:
‘I feel I must say how marvellous you both and all the people involved with our wonderful WDDTY are. God bless you all.” – Patricia
“We are now aged 93 and 87. We are both fit and enjoy reasonably good health, . . . I’m sure in no small part to all the knowledge we have gleaned from our avid reading of WDDTY.” – Geraint and Susan
“Your writings and letters – and the magazine – have been part of my life for so long, almost family, that now I cannot imagine otherwise. I cannot tell you how much I have appreciated all your information and advice and on numerous occasions that has given me the courage to deal with the doctor’s surgery, who. . . insist that I must take statins to stay alive (I am now 91!).” – Inge
“Many years ago, I send you a large sum of money I could ill afford to help your magazine improve and grow. I weighed up the gamble and won! I shall be 87 in April! Your magazine is top quality with a huge range of topics. I may need your help into my 90’s!” – Janet.
As with George Bailey, those letters offered us a tiny porthole into the lives of people we have served over the years and the impact we may have had on their lives. All the letters came from people living very long lives and in good health, and our fondest hope is that our presence in their lives is responsible, in some small way, for their longevity.
Nick Williams, author of The Work We Were Born to Do, tells of a businessman who told the employees of a company that made pacemakers:
“You literally keep me alive with the new pacemaker I have fitted every year,” with his hand on his heart. “Because I am alive, I can continue to run my company, and to employ dozens of people, and feed and support their families. The impact you people have is huge.”
Each employee left the meeting tremendously uplifted about his job, understood that he was not simply a cog in a giant machine. What he did had a positive impact on somebody else’s life. Suddenly, his work was infused with meaning and purpose.
For most of us, work is meaningless because we cannot make the connection between what we do and what we contribute to the world. Without a sense of service to something besides paying our bills, we feel as though our gifts are being wasted.
A job becomes a calling when you understand that you are making an impact on someone else’s life.
May you celebrate the impact you’ve had on the world. (And may an angel help you recognize it!)
