Stories

One of the greatest causes for hurt and disaster in this world is the fact that we focus too much on how different we all are. Different cultures, different races, different religions, different viewpoints, different opinions. Gosh, we even get riled up if our opinions differ on something as trivial as football. But what would happen if we focused on how alike we truly are? We are all human. We all make mistakes. We all want love. We all want acceptance. We all want to be attractive. And we all want the things we want the most to come to us exactly when we want them, exactly how we want them. But there is something that goes deeper than that. Each and every one of us has a story to tell. A story of sadness, heartbreak, love, romance or joy. No matter what, our stories began at the moment of our conception. Each day has brought something new, a new moment, a new fingerprint that added more words to the manuscript of our lives. Not one of us has gone a day, even a moment, without having a story. Each life is tattooed with it. It is unescapable. Maybe if we realized this, the differences we see wouldn’t be so prominent. As I took this photo, I thought about how our eyes are the window to our soul. Then, as I edited this photo, I realized that our eyes tell our story, sometimes whether we want them to or not. It is the easiest to identify a persons true emotions when you look them directly in the eye. And I mean truly look them in the eye, with the intention of fully understanding the emotions they are feeling. When a person is truly broken, you can see it through the exhaustion in their eyes. When a person has seen too much and experienced more suffering than any person should, there is no way you can look them in the eye and not see that. When a person is truly joyful and their smile reaches their eyes, you can see it. When a person is lying, you can see the deception. Its truly remarkable the way that God did that. He even made it so that tears, little drops of water, come out of our eyes when we experience sadness or joy or even too much laughter. So, next time we are focusing too much on the differences between us, lets stop for a second and focus on the gazillions of stories that whisper through the wind of this world. The stories of billions upon billions of beating and broken hearts whose eyes hold a world of words and hurts and broken pieces that we try so desperately to hide.

Look one another in the eye and wait for the stories to unfold. I guarantee they will.

{Day 65}