Cherish in the Fullest Sense

I remember learning about one of the connotaions of the word “cherish.” It meant in a more literal sense “to share body heat.” There is a true story that illustrates this about two friends who were homeless in a foreign country. Homelessness is bad enough in one’s own country where you speak the language. Its anguish is worsened when one is further limited by a language barrier. These two friends were reduced to sharing a sleeping bag along the roadside by night and one was suffering from a fever. It was the body heat of the healthier friend that was helping to keep the other alive. They were male and female and had once been physically attracted to each other but all such impulses were irrelevant at that stage. They had evaporated in what had become the crisis of their lives. A crisis that would see them humbled and begging for spare change before they would find safe haven and healing, and eventually an opportunity to rebuild their lives as individuals and as a couple. If we only knew we need each other now as that sick homeless one needed the other. We are all that desperate at some level. If we only knew we would cherish each other more.