I read a book when I was in middle school called “Stuck in Neutral” ,which is about a boy named Shawn who has severe cerebral palsy. This is a great novel for many reasons, but there is one small detail about this particular novel that sparked my fancy and has stuck with me for a long time. At one point Shawn’s sister Cindy jumps out of a car to help a dog who has been hit by a car. I always thought that she was the sort of person that I would want to be like… someone who would jump out of a car, without a second thought, to help someone in need. Someone who cared.

Well today as I was coming home from work (I work for a summer camp held at the nature sanctuary at my university) a tortoise was in the center of the road. I asked my mother to pull over and I immediately jumped out of the car and ran towards the tortoise. Cars were coming at me before I had a chance to grab the tortoise, and instead of jumping out of the way when the cars did not slow down, I stood my ground and held my hand out at the car yelling “STOP, STOP, STOP!” it struck me momentarily that the car might not stop, that this might be it, but I did not flinch as the car stopped mere feet from me and the tortoise safely tucked away in his/her shell before me. I picked up the tortoise, took him/her into the nature sanctuary (the direction in which s/he was headed) and waited to make sure s/he wouldn’t turn around to try to cross the road again.

I always thought that I wanted to be someone of integrity, someone who would jump out of a car to help a creature in danger. I do not know if I always had this sleeping dragon within me that lie dormant, or whether this is a person who I became and am becoming… maybe I was always a person of integrity, but I think that I have grown along with my ideas of what it means to be a person of integrity. I think this dragon lies dormant in everyone, but we just have to have the courage to slowly wake her from her slumber. We have to be prepared to make mistakes, but with this risk of waking the dragon, we will be surprised at the people who we become.