People are People

You know something that's crazy to me? The fact that I am not the center of the universe. Yes, this is absolutely absurd.

The world makes so much sense to me when I'm the center of it though. Donald Miller made a great comparison of life being like a movie. When I am standing in a room, my eyes are the cameras, my ears the microphones, and everyone around me are actors. When I walk out of the room, the action happening shifts from inside the room to wherever I happen to be walking. That would make sense right? It's my movie, my cameras are capturing a new scene with new actors; the actors in the previous room are now unimportant and I'm the star. Everything changes when I want it to, and only people that I want to be in my movie are in it.

No, this is ridiculous. That's obviously not how it works, but it's funny how little we really think about other people.

Just driving to school, I probably pass a hundred or so cars on the opposite side of the road. Every single one of those cars has at least one person in it, and each individual person has an entire life completely separate from mine. A single person in a single other car has a whole set of friends, problems, sorrows, jokes, responsibilities, and privileges that I am completely unaware of, and I pass by this car in less than a second. To this person, their life is the movie... their friends are the actors, their eyes the cameras and their ears the microphones. And I... I hardly even made the cut to be an extra in their movie; they probably didn't even notice me through my windshield. And this is only one person in one car out of the countless hundreds of thousands of cars on the road.

What inspired this post was actually my boredom; in my boredom I clicked the "next blog" button at the top of the page. I was directed to the blog of a mother whose husband was having knee surgery, child was having bronchitis, and dog had just become paralyzed. She detailed these events and talked about the emotional pain she went through during these events.

I wouldn't have even known this woman existed had I not clicked the next button on this website. This woman who has her own set of friends, her own social circles, her own problems, her own beliefs... and I could've easily just let her existence slip right by without even noticing.

Maybe it's time, as christians, that we truly get our eyes off ourselves, that we stop caring about our movies and go out and make other peoples' better.