I love Howie Day’s song Collide. I can relate to every word of it.  The chorus is so beautiful and poignant:

Even the best fall down sometimes
Even the wrong words seem to rhyme

Out of the doubt that fills my mind, I somehow find
You and I collide

We all fall. Every one of us. Christian, atheist, Hindu, Muslim, everyone. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has to pick themselves off the ground and start over again. The lucky ones have someone there to lend them a hand. The most unfortunate have the entire world watching when they fall.

And it seems like nobody gives any other people any grace. When I fell completely broken, Christians told (and still do tell me!) that it was all my fault for not having enough faith or not being a good enough Christian, you name it. It was the atheists, agnostics, and non-religious that picked me up and helped me get back to me again, but I had already come to the conclusion that I was one of them. When a Christian falls, the non-religious say, “See? Christianity makes no difference!” Heck, when a Christian falls, even other Christians often ostracize him/her.

And we all get caught up in our personal dogmas and missions and forget how the labels dehumanize our fellow people. Hurt is hurt no matter who you are. Shame is shame. We all have our doubts, our fears. We all have our good moments and our bad. But as we enjoy laughing at someone’s downfall just because they believed something different from us, we have become a little less of a person. No matter our religion, we  are human beings that want to find truth, hope, and happiness. We should use every opportunity, every collision with another person to find it in our hearts to show compassion and mercy–heaven or no heaven, God or no God.

And yes, it is funny to watch someone who caused us so much pain fall flat on their face. I’ve laughed. We’ve all done it. Even the nicest people I know have at least at one time said something to the effect of, “Well, he got what was coming to him!” But we don’t know. We don’t know what has happened to that person to cause them to be where they are. And what better way to acknowledge our own humanness than to show compassion and mercy when someone is at their weakest? Can you imagine how far it would go if we gave someone a hug instead of pointing our fingers at them? And it’s HARD. It defies our sense of justice. I’m sitting here preaching the sermon, and there are some people I am not sure I could be strong enough to show compassion to if they ever fell flat on their face. But how so much better it is to be merciful! No, I am not throwing flower petals around and suggesting hugs and rainbows will solve the world’s problems, or that we should just forgive and forget without acknowledging the feelings or letting others know how we feel. I’m not saying we should stop debating or pointing out the flaws in others’ thinking (and the flaws in others’ thinking I think can be humorous and I laugh quite frequently over them)– I think that helps us grow as people.  But how awesome would it be to be the bigger person when someone is hurting? To stop the bickering for five minutes to help someone off the ground. How many problems would it solve if we would all just act like decent human beings for once? I’ve been in the mud, and it sucks. And people empathize with me. And after we throw our pity parties, we go and make fun of someone else who is in the same place. It’s wrong. Feelings are the same even if they occur for different reasons. And we all make mistakes and do stupid things.

I am going to go puke rainbows and sunshine now, then go play by myself because I have lost all of my friends for being such a stick in the mud.

**Note: I am not talking about sociopaths in this post. Or politicians.

Tags: atheism, Christianity, collide, forgiveness, Howie Day, humanity, mercy, rainbow puke, religion

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 2:21 am and is filed under Life in General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.