5 Lessons To Make You Think About the Way We Treat People">

This was for­warded to me via email. Five sto­ries from five dif­fer­ent sources and I just want to share this so we start think­ing about how we treat the last, the lost and the least among us.

Happy Christ­mas Every­one! This is from Madeleine L’Engle. Some­thing I first read years ago that gave me a lot to think about. I sug­gest that this be your own reflec­tion piece for this Christ­mas night.

Since this is the sea­son of advent, I would like to share a reflec­tion I made some years ago which rings all the more true this year with all the dif­fi­cult events around the world and in our per­sonal lives.

In moments of hope­less­ness, and despair and fear; and dur­ing this sea­son of advent and wait­ing, it is inter­est­ing that the story that struck me most is not the story of Santa Claus come to bring gifts. It is not even the age old story of Jesus being born in the manger, vis­ited by magi and shepherds.

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs spoke to the grad­u­at­ing class of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. This is the first part of a speech that made a great impres­sion on me when I first read it. Great read!

“When did we see you naked, or hun­gry, or thirsty, or vis­ited you in prison?”

“What­ever you do to the least of your broth­ers, you did to me…”

C.S. Lewis once said, “When we get to heaven, there will be three sur­prises: First, we will be sur­prised by the peo­ple that we find there, many of whom we surely had not expected to see. The sec­ond sur­prise is that we will be sur­prised by the peo­ple who are absent–the ones we expected to see but are not there. The third sur­prise, of course, will be that we are there ourselves.”

The Gospel says that to the sur­prise of many, the saved and the unsaved, the sheep and the goats, will be sep­a­rated by the love you show to your fel­low­men and not by sta­tus, social posi­tion or even your beliefs.

But is the world a world of sheep and goats? We would like to think that way. We would like to think that life is as easy as black and white. And yet, over the years, I’ve found this notion to be far from the truth. There are always two sides to a story. Life is usu­ally never either/or. To look for sim­ple expla­na­tions is the bias of the human intel­lect, but that does not usu­ally cor­re­spond to real­ity. Noth­ing is ever as straight­for­ward as it appears.