21 Oct Good News Is All Around Us. We Just Have to Open Our Eyes

Pittsburg City Council member Angelica Lopez. (Courtesy of Angelica Lopez)

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of columns by Pittsburg City Council member Angelica Lopez spotlighting positive stories and community leaders making a difference in the city.

Commentary, Angelica Lopez

Every day, we are bombarded with negative news. From the moment we tune into our social media accounts, we are fed negativity after negativity: our country, constantly divided over politics; the lack of humanity when dealing with our differences. Children get bullied at school, people act out in road rage, and some of us may even be fighting quiet battles inside our homes or within ourselves.

Is it really all that bad? Is the news just bad overall? Or could it be that we are just not looking in the right direction?

Over the past few months, I have done my best to answer those questions. For starters, I went “out there,” into my Pittsburg community, and I started to observe and interact. What I found was the following:

The Bay Church Compassion Ministry puts together a weekly outreach program in Bay Point, Martinez and Pittsburg. The director, Dr. Paul Long, is an actual medical doctor who could be in a comfortable medical practice but instead chose to serve our communities by caring for unhoused people. His team has been out there doing compassion work, which includes a showers program that involves cleaning a portable bathroom/shower after each use.

Next, I came across an inspiring Facebook post about a woman in our community who bakes cakes for children whose parents cannot afford to buy them a cake for their birthdays. Her name is Barbara Dixon, and she is such a kind soul. I imagine that each time she bakes and decorates a cake for a child in need, she imagines their smile, and love just pours onto the batter.  Each cake she delivers is a story of its own: a child’s joy worth reading about.

I also learned about a gentleman named Carlos Aguilar, who collects used bicycles, refurbishes them, and gifts them to families in need. He does not do so as part of a nonprofit, nor to collect any profit. Rather, he does this as part of his mission to spread God’s love and gospel. Who knew that bikes would have such a profound impact? But maybe, just like a cake, the treasure behind these random acts of kindness is just that, kindness, from a place of sincere love.

The good news that our hearts long for might already be all around us. We just have to put down our phones and open our eyes to see it. And it’s all made possible by kind souls living amongst us.