I’m sure you’re familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan ( Luke 10 : 25-37 ) about being a good neighbor. What we need today more than anything else are more good neighbors. Good Neighbors are those who are willing to reach out, without prejudice, to each other in any kind of situation or need. Your neighbor is everybody you meet in life: rich, poor, male, female, black, brown, white. It makes no difference who your neighbors are as long as they are people of flesh and blood like yourself. They are members of your family, the human family.

I could tell you many stories about good neighbors. But the following true story resonates with me because it illustrates how being a good neighbor not only helps another person; it can actually benefits you too.

An El Paso County patrolman, Allen Falby, and Alfred Smith, a businessman, met for the first time on a hot June night when Falby crashed his motorcycle into a truck.

He was racing down the road to overtake a speeding truck when the vehicle slowed down to make a turn. Unaware that the truck was slowing, Falby slammed full throttle into its tailgate. The crack-up demolished the motorcycle and nearly amputated one of Falby’s legs. As he lay in agony on the pavement, a pool of blood began to form beneath his shattered limb. He had ruptured an artery in his leg and was bleeding to death.

It was then that Al Smith arrived on the scene.

He had been driving home along the road when he saw the accident. Shaken but alert, Smith bounded out of his car promptly and came to the man’s rescue almost before the sound of the impact died on the night air.

Smith wasn’t a doctor but could see what had to be done for the dying patrolman. Whipping off his tie, he quickly bound Falby’s leg in a crude tourniquet. It worked. The flow of blood slackened to a trickle and then stopped entirely. When the ambulance arrived a few minutes later, Smith learned from the medics that he had saved Falby’s life.

Five year later, around Christmas, Falby was on night patrol when he received a radio call from headquarters to investigate an accident along U.S. 80. A car smashed into a tree. A man was in serious condition, and an ambulance was on the way.

Falby reached the wreck well before the ambulance. Pushing his way past a group of frightened bystanders, he found the injured man slumped unconscious across the torn car seat. The man’s right pant’s leg was saturated and sticky with blood. He had severed a major artery and was bleeding to death. Well trained in first aid, Falby quickly applied a tourniquet above the ruptured artery. When the bleeding stopped, he pulled the man from the car and made him more comfortable on the ground.

That’s when Falby recognized the victim. He was Alfred Smith, the man who have saved his own life five years before. Both men were brought together again for the same purpose: to be good neighbors to one another in their time of need. Each of them had saved the life of the other in exactly the same way.

“Well,” Falby told Doug Storer of the National Tattler, who first reported theis story, “you might say, it all goes to prove that one good tourniquet deserves another!”
If you see someone in need while driving along the highway, you might be tempted to keep going like the Priest and the Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). But, what if you are the one who needs help?

Your time, perhaps, just hasn’t come for you to see that so clearly!

—Fr. Hugh Duffy