Layers

She is blessed beyond belief with her friends and family.  She has a small group that comes every Tuesday to eat and study together.  Though some nights there isn't much studying - instead there's story telling like tonight. They are laughing together as they tell their life's war stories.  None of the stories include "war" - just simple things like dynamite alarm clocks that get the bomb squad called, stories of past relationships, the time the cat was left in the refrigerator all day... just simple day to day stories that make us laugh.

In a birds eye view this woman has the perfect life.  Friends, family, a nice house, a job (which is no simple feat in this economy) and even pets.  What you don't see though is her true story.  In order to see a person's story it is always so much deeper than it looks.

For instance, we could start with the first layer.  This woman who looks like she has everything is riddled with pain and health problems.  Every time she swivels her head to listen to another person's story a sharp pain radiates down her neck into her lower spine.  Sometimes depending on where she looks or how she turns her neck a pain shoots down her arms and makes her entire arm go numb.  Does she wince or cry out - no because that is considered a weakness in her eyes.  So she pushes it all back until they leave.  When they leave she can collapse in a chair, let the tears come to her eyes and wonder how she's going to get through another day of this.  Then she will wonder how do you  put your feet on the floor in the morning knowing that first step will be the beginning of a new day of pain.  However she doesn't have that luxury right now, so she smiles and laughs and works harder at pushing all the rest further and further away. 

So with a minor glimpse into this woman's first layer we see pain.  Now we think to ourselves - well she's stubborn that's why she pushes through.  She has a room full of friends and family - why not lean on them.  Heck there are even a few in that room who have asked her that.  Well in order to understand the answers to those accusations/questions you would have to go into another layer of who that woman is and how she became that way. 

So the question is this - do we dare go deeper?  To go deeper means we connect ourselves to her even more - to go deeper means that we would have to accept that the pain and suffering she holds within that mind could be too much to bear - even for someone who is strong. 

Isn't that what we always do - weight out the options of how much we REALLY want to know?  How much we REALLY want to get involved?

The answer is this - in order to go beyond who we are and what we are dealing with we must reach outside of ourselves to see what others are going through.  It's harder than it sounds because life is just much easier if we keep things on a basic level and do not reach beyond the surface.

So I ask you - are you ready to reach beyond the surface of someone else - or are you happy within your own walls?