A Choice: Making the world more like Heaven

Have you ever been having a really bad day – maybe work is stressing you out or you just lost a loved one or perhaps you just forgot to grab your cup of coffee on the way out the door – and then somebody seems to go out of their way to make it even worse? It could be a random person in line at Starbucks who bumps into you, spills your coffee, then looks at you like you are inconveniencing them. It could be a person in traffic who saw the “Lane Closing” signs for the last 3 miles but decided to wait until the last possible second to merge, cutting you off and forcing you off onto the shoulder, effectively causing heart palpitations and a near anxiety attack. It could be a rude customer berating you for not breaking a company policy for them. Or, it could be something less trivial, something much worse. Maybe a friend betrayed your trust. Maybe your partner told you things just aren’t working out. Maybe your drug-addicted family member snuck into your purse and stole cash you worked hard for in order to fund their destructive habit.

Life can be full of these moments. If we’re honest, most of us have some kind of interaction every single day that can leave us feeling like the world is out to get us, like people don’t care about us. Most days confront us with multiple opportunities to feel worthless.

Here’s what’s more interesting. If you look back through that list at the top, you’ll probably realize you’ve been on both sides of those situations. You’ve been the victim at times, but you’ve also been the perpetrator at times. Sometimes its you who are the rude customer. Sometimes it’s you who are the inconsiderate driver. You may not have left your partner, but you’ve surely had days where you haven’t treated them quite right. Maybe you’ve even had your days in the past where you’ve done less than admirable things to support bad habits in your life. We’ve all found ourselves on the giving end and on the receiving end somewhere along the spectrum of malevolence.

Why is that interesting?

That is interesting because it confronts us with the reality that we don’t live in a self-centered vacuum. All of life’s events don’t center around us. In our minds they do, because they’re our minds. But every interaction we have ripples outwardly to the people around us. When you stop to think about how moments that probably meant nothing to the other person actually made your day worse, you start to realize how much your seemingly innocuous little moments may actually be impacting the people around you as well – for better or worse.

Going a bit further, it’s interesting because it presents us with the reality that every single day, in every single interaction, we have the opportunity to make somebody else’s life look a little more like Heaven or a little more like Hell. We can bring peace into situations that may look bleak, and we can share joy with those who are excited about life. We can exhibit patience and self-control when the more natural response may be much more volatile. We can show good will toward people around us when the inclination may be doubt. We can choose to be loving. Or, we can choose something else. We can bring discord and sorrow. We can let irritation and impatience get the best of us, lashing out to those around us because of the turmoil going on inside of us. We can belittle people and treat them mockingly. We can choose to be self-centered, which, if you didn’t know, is the opposite of love.

We live in a world that is filled with brokenness. To see this, you probably don’t need to go any further than your own family, maybe your own household. In our interactions with the world around us, we should be focused on healing that brokenness, not adding to it. Many of the people we scuttle past in our comings and goings have some kind of Hell pressing in on their lives. You know it’s true because you probably do too. If you don’t now, you have before. We have the opportunity to introduce a little piece of Heaven into their day. Maybe it’s just a smile, maybe it’s just holding back and letting that person merge, maybe it’s just a good old, Midwestern, “Ope! Sorry about that!” instead of a scowl when you bump into somebody in Starbucks. Maybe it’s taking a few extra minutes to have a chat with the person you met in line. Maybe it’s praying with them. Maybe it’s talking through why you believe the way you do instead of dogmatically asserting that the person you’re talking to (or talking at) should believe that way too.

Making somebody’s life look a little more like Heaven can look all kinds of different ways. To make it somewhat practical, look at any interaction you have and apply the litmus test of Galatians 5:22-23 (I use the HCSB version here) to it. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law.” Did the interaction exhibit any of those characteristics? Or, maybe it’s easier to recognize if the interaction exhibited the opposite of any of those characteristics. Either way, that will help you see to which end you shifted their day – toward Heaven, or not.

We have more power than we realize in moments that seem completely unpowerful. The line at the store, the time-killing conversation, driving in traffic. We also have the ability to turn some of those moments into bigger moments – inviting the co-worker out to coffee, for instance, turns a water-cooler chat into something more. And in each of these instances we have the opportunity to leverage the moment for good or for ill in that person’s life. Let’s look for ways to leverage the moment for the good.