Lord this morning as I sit at my children’s school I am reminded of You and all You do and the significance of the big and the small…
Lord as I look out on this purple array of flowers I study each one…. no face alike, some with spots some with lines, some brown flecks some more grey others more black and so the finest details change…
I stare a little longer and the hues jump out at me…same plant, same stem and yet some are so pale they seem lilac and others so deep they look irredescent in the morning sun glow…
I wonder it doesn’t take me long to think of the fact that the Lord has made us all so very uniquely on purpose… it doesn’t take me long to think each flower serves a purpose for an insect the other wouldn’t achieve… it doesn’t take me long to conclude that and yet why when it comes to people who are not the same as me, does it take me so long… how long does it take you to realise this person’s life journey was so different to mine… does it make them right or wrong… no… they didn’t ask to be born into that body, to those parents in that time zone… but what have they done with their lives.
I work with some of the poorest poor working people. Not street people, people who work and work hard and achieve much with what they have and there are times I am ashamed of what effort I put into my life to accomplish what I do. These people don’t have cars to go out with, they have to take public transport… they don’t have a weekend… they are cleaning their homes… let alone taking a drive to the beach to sit there for a day… they are up at 4am to get cleaned up and go to work, come home at 6 because of transport, make supper clean house then go to church at 8, finish there at 10pm, take church transport home and up at 4 to start the cycle again…
Let’s consider others more highly than ourselves, next time you see someone running for a taxi, let them run, stop your car for 2 minutes… let’s stop our lives for 2 minutes every hour and consider how to help the person next to us… imagine a world where we considered others more highly than ourselves… one of the great theologians said, “humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.”