you can learn a lot in a wal-mart aisle...

A lot of days you never know what someone else is hiding inside. A lot of times I like to watch people, imagine who they are, what they are doing, why they are at the gas station, with out of state plates, wearing a wedding ring, but traveling alone…it makes me realize how little I am that so many people are experiencing lives all around me and most of them I don’t know what that life is. I don’t know what makes them happy, I don’t know what weighs on their mind every morning when they get out of bed, I don’t know if they have a happy marriage or a child who they haven’t heard from for weeks and they don’t know where they are…we just don’t ever know what people hold inside.

I was at Wal-Mart yesterday waiting to use the digital camera machine to print pictures. The family in front of me was printing off wedding pictures so I stood for quite a while, which gave me a good chance to just watch people. I saw a little man who looked like my grandfather in his pressed dress shirt and creased “dungarees” with a little cart that had bread and lunchmeat and Tylenol in it. Was he sent on a grocery store run by the wife who pressed those creases into his blue jeans or was he a widower, picking up dinner for the next week?

However, what really made me pause to reflect about how we never know what other people are dealing with and going through was this younger, tan man in dirty jeans, boots and a t-shirt with the arms ripped off. He was swaggering down the aisle in his t-shirt that read, “The liver is a bad thing…it must be killed”. I would assume that this was in reference to killing off vital organ parts with alcohol but I just kept starting at him – he probably thought I was admiring his swagger – but he walked by a couple of times and I got really mad the final time he walked by. I was so angry at his shirt, I wanted to tell him to take it off, that he was ignorant and rude, that he had no regard for what that really meant. I wanted to tell him about my mother who has non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver…I wanted to ask him, “Really, you want to kill off your liver, so you can live with the realities of liver disease and the ramifications that it brings to your quality of life, your family, really, that’s funny to you?”

But you know what, that shirt probably is hilarious to him, I can’t imagine why else he would wear it. He doesn’t know that a girl in Wal-Mart would be so taken aback by his shirt that she would think about it all day.

It challenges me to really be more patient and caring with people – to take more time with people because we don’t know, nor could we ever know, what all someone is living in, with and through. I get probably three or four solicitation calls a day at work from head-hunters, investment companies, recruitment firms, software companies, you name it. I am not as gracious on the phone as I should be. I do not always smile and say good morning to the person sharing the elevator with me. Sometimes I avoid certain people at church because they have nothing positive to ever say, I just can not bear the burden of hearing their on-going, self deprecating stories of woe week after week, while dealing with my own life.

But, I need to take these moments to be human to someone else because it just may be the worst day of someone else’s life and a smile or a pleasant “no thank you” might be all they need for that moment. That church member may be a in a marriage where her husband treats her like a commodity and she is just that sad and has no one else to talk to about it. I need to be the hands and feet and ears and smile of Christ (as cliché as that it). I need to bear the burden of others who do not understand the grace of His taking their burden, so that I might help them to turn to the one who can take it all.