One of my all-time favorite movies is "August Rush" with Freddie Highmore. The movie is about two musicians that meet and fall in love but their child gets separated from them. All three of them are trying to find each other the whole movie using music and fate as their mediums. At one point, the child, August, becomes involved in a sketchy child street musician group run by a mysterious old man named Wizard. Wizard asks August, “If you could be anything in the whole world, what would you be?” and the orphan replies, “Found.”
We may not all identify with dreamy musicians or orphans, but I can guarantee that as humans, we can all identify with this one desire: to be found. If you have ever been lost at a grocery store as a child, once the panic sets in, the only thought you have is of the desperate need to find or be found. If you have ever traveled overseas and gotten lost in a large foreign city, you often do not think about the cool place you are in or the culture around you, you think about the need to understand exactly where you are and where you are going. If you are a paranoid driver like me, being lost on the road is one of the most frustrating situations to be in. Alone on a highway and you discover you’re going the wrong direction. Not only have you wasted the gas and time to get to where you are, you also do not know how to correct the situation. Frantically you turn on Siri or Google Maps to receive guidance on how to find your way; unless, of course, you are like me, and are confined to the medieval lifestyle with only a flip phone. Being lost is one of the most stressful stages of human life, both physically and emotionally. Therefore making being found, one of the most refreshing stages of contentedness.
It is part of our human nature to want to be known. It is one of the best feelings in the world if a person can look at you and instantly know your mood or your thoughts. People feel so loved and appreciated if someone can see into them, think they are special, understand and discover what is good and beautiful about them. Think of a time when someone observed something about you, where they saw you with their own eyes, not just heard a fun fact you shared about yourself or gossip they heard from someone else, instead where they figured out a piece to your puzzle on their own. Did you not feel known then? Did you not feel seen and appreciated?
When you spend a lot of time together the deep parts of a person’s character and their innermost quirks and fears really come out. When you are around each other that much, you cannot pretend. You cannot hide who you really are, or the things that really matter to you. You cannot hide what scares you or the shadows of your past. You cannot hide what you look like when you are ill, or unwashed, or distraught. You cannot hide the inner person that comes out when you are pissed off, PMS-ing, homesick, experiencing culture shock or feeling lonely. You cannot hide your true self when you live in community with people in such close proximity, especially for such an extended amount of time.
I have this theory that if everyone wrote out their stories, people would love each other a lot better. Chick-Fil-A made a video about this concept a while back. The video shows people coming in and out of the restaurant, including the employees, and over each person’s head is a sentence explaining a tiny snapshot of what their lives are like. Hovering over one of the young adult employees reads the sentence, “Working full-time job to pay off student loans.” Over one of the old woman sitting and eating her meal “Husband died a year ago that day. It would have been their 52nd anniversary.” Each person in the store has a very different story. Some are happy and full of hope and purpose. Some are depressing as all get out. But each person looks no different than the other. The facial expressions are the same. The clothes are not especially different. On the outside, you cannot tell the ones that are in pain.
There is a quote that says, “Be kind; everyone you know is fighting a great battle.” Is that not incredibly true? Every single one of us is going through something. Some of our trials are disastrously terrible. Some are trivial struggles. Some of us are going through heartbreak. Some are in love. Any one of us, no matter our clothing or facial expression, could be feeling any emotion or fighting any battle.
Humans forget all too often that each of us has a story. Each of us is dealing with something, good or bad, happy or sad.
What if we were all required to express our true feelings? How differently would this world operate? I guarantee that if you were aware your co-worker hates her life and wants to remove herself from the world, you would treat her differently. You would offer well-wishes to the woman on the bus if you knew she was pregnant with her husband’s baby. You would say congratulations to the college student that just graduated and paid their own way through school. You would care if you knew the grumpy old person that lives in the apartment across from you lost the love of his life and doesn’t know what else to live for. You would show compassion and grace to your cruel school peer if you knew his sister just passed away in a car accident.
I say all this not to make you paranoid but to challenge you to figure out everyone’s past and secrets. The point is not to make you want to puzzle together everyone else’s struggles. It is to make you aware that everyone has them. Treat everyone as such. Help them feel found.
