It's Not Me. It's You!

“I wish everyone was as perfect as me. Obviously, they weren’t thinking when they made that decision. Has everyone lost their minds?” Do thoughts that resemble any of these ever play across the screen of your mind? I know. Not you.

But, me! I have entertained thoughts like these, for an exhausting amount of time in my almost 40 years of living. “If people could just get their act together, the world would be a beautiful place.”

Let’s face it. The human race is flawed, confused, and inherently evil. Including you and me. Most of the challenges in our lives can be traced back to people. (Like Adam and Eve.) And because of this trace, we spend our existence tracing through names of people that are strategically placed along our path.

There is a truth that changed my life and view of people in an unparalleled way. “We’re not fighting against people.” The man who wrote it knew what it was to have every single kind of “people” problem and yet he carried on. His perseverance changed all of Christendom and beyond.

If you’re always thinking people are the problem, these three truths might help you think again.

1. We need people. Upper, downer, loner, gatherer. No matter what tag we’ve proudly worn. We need people. Instead of hoping that everyone “gets” us, we should spend our time trying to “get” people. Listen to someone else's troubles without interrupting. Ask someone about their life story without sharing yours. Spend your life trying to bring your best into every relationship. We need to figure this out. At the end of our life, it will be people that shovel dirt over our casket or place our ashes in an urn. Hopefully, they’ll be some other people standing around mourning that day, too.

2. People are our business. Building houses, scooping ice cream, homeschooling or designing mobile apps. Never mind what we do, we do it directly or indirectly for people. People aren’t peripheral. They are at the very center and core of everything that we do. No matter our vocation or season of life somehow what we do is affecting the existence of another human being. For good or bad. We get to choose.

3. We can’t escape people. People over here, people over there, people everywhere. Even if we get our groceries delivered to our door, at least for now, another person has had a hand in it. Even at the spa! The sacred place of hot stones, soothing music, and steam, a person is asking us questions and using their bodies to touch our bodies. I know on our worst days and during our seasons of heartbreak, we think we want everyone to disappear. But, it’s not going to happen. Heaven and hell will have this in common - they will be filled with people. No one's escaping this truth.

Oh, and there’s a whopper of a truth that no Christ follower should ignore. Jesus died for people. People that mocked him, lied on him, denied him, and everything in between. If people are that important to God...