Everyone You Meet

Fill in the blank. "Everyone I meet…"

Let me propose three possible ways we might answer that question:

My good friend John Fiastro has this excellent attitude toward life. He says, “People just want to help you.” He goes through life thinking that everyone he meets wants to help him. As a result, he finds people who help him all the time. It’s a great way to live. That’s the first way we can answer that question.

The second way is the opposite. To say, “Everyone I meet doesn’t like me.” I’ll be honest; I’ve learned this is my default. Over the last year I have been working on networking and trying to make connections, especially in the larger Catholic world. And that’s the feeling I have. I feel small and insignificant. This is not a good way to go through life.

Vanessa Van Edwards works on what she calls “the science of people.” Her book Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication is all about what makes someone charismatic and able to captivate a room while others fail to even capture people’s attention. It is about learning the cues that draw people to you and create connection. Her work came out of her own personal failure. She assumed that when she stepped into a room that no one liked her. Her life’s work came from looking at studying behaviors that promote connection so that we can change from “everybody I meet hates me” to “everybody I meet is an opportunity to build connection.” If you struggle with the same thoughts and feelings I have, it would be worth listening to her talks, which you can find on YouTube.

A third and the best way I have found to answer that question or fill in the blank is a message I heard from Andy Stanley many years ago. It’s a message I know I need to internalize and have not yet done. Some messages just stay with you over time. Some messages you wish you had preached. It’s so obvious; so true and yet so easily forgotten. It is at the heart of the Christian life:

“Everyone you meet is someone for whom Jesus died.”

Everyone you meet is someone who matters to God so much that he gave his one and only Son for him, for her. It’s vitally important that we remember that truth for ourselves, but equally important that we remember that in our dealings with others.

Imagine the difference it would make in how we treated people if we kept that truth front and center. I need to remember that especially when people are annoying or frustrating me. God reminded me of that message that everyone matters to him as I was sitting on a plane trying to write. I love writing on a plane. I also like the aisle seat and so, as I tried to write, I kept getting bumped and knocked by people coming down the aisle. God said, “Everyone bumping you is someone for whom my Son died.” If we can keep that thought front and center it will take the focus off ourselves and put God and others ahead of us.

C.S. Lewis writes in the Weight of Glory, “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

He continues:

“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”

Rooting for you,
Tom