Learning New Stories (Friday Devotional)

Do nothing out of rivalry or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves.

- Philippians 2:3

Every morning at roughly 7:15 am, I am confronted by my archnemesis. Our encounters last no longer than a few wordless seconds, but they leave me annoyed each time, thankful I won’t have to deal with this pest for another 24 hours. Who is this enemy of mine? A Golden Retriever.

You see, I pass this dog on my morning run every day. As I approach her backyard, she’s usually lying flat on the back porch. But when she sees me coming, she leaps to her feet and races to the fence, barking at the top of her lungs, baring her teeth, and doing everything in her power to get me past her yard. I’ve tried to stop and talk soothingly to her; I even once brought some food to toss over the fence to her—but no. Ours is apparently destined to be an adversarial relationship.

So when, over the Christmas holidays, I took a few weeks off from running, I can’t say I missed seeing her every day. It was something of a relief to go through the day without getting yelled at. But when I got back in the swing of things last week, I knew our familiar confrontations would resume. As I approached her yard, I braced myself for my daily berating.

But it didn’t come, and for a very good reason—instead of lying on the back porch by herself, she had four little Golden Retriever puppies snuggled up against her. Sometime over the break, my archenemy had apparently become a mother.

It’s amazing how quickly my judgment of that dog shifted in that moment. She suddenly went from being a one-dimensional nuisance, a side character in my story, to a more complex creature. With this one extra piece of information, I had to reckon with the fact that this Golden Retriever had a story of her own.

If this is true of a dog, it is surely far truer of people, the only creations made in God’s image and in his likeness. It’s tempting to fall into the same trap I did with that dog, regarding your coworkers and neighbors as bit players in a story where you are the protagonist. It’s easy to judge other people based entirely on how they affect you, to ignore and disregard whatever else they may be going through in the name of self-justification.

But God calls us to look at our fellow humans with a different perspective—not as nuisances, but as neighbors. The Lord calls us to consider the plight of others even when we derive no benefit from doing so, to pray for others even when we’d rather not, to love others as God has loved us.

Our world is a place where people are often dehumanized, reduced to less than they are. But the Lord calls his disciples to be countercultural in that regard, to look at each person as a beloved child of God, worthy of grace and love, and to act accordingly. The only person’s story you know from beginning to end is your own—so instead of giving that story your undivided attention, perhaps it’s time to start listening to someone else’s.