How Different Am I From Them?

Hi there, dear reader. I'll be honest with you, this wasn't the piece I intended to write this week. Every idea I picked up slipped through my fingers just as quickly. After writing, deleting, rewriting and deleting all over again, I decided to stop forcing it and simply write whatever came to mind. Perhaps that's exactly where this piece was waiting for me all along.

The other evening as I walked home from work, I found myself looking at people I have passed countless times before. Only this time, I wasn't just looking. I was wondering. Looking at all those street kids, the mentally unstable men and women, the homeless young children, the men with rugged clothes who seem to have spent the whole night on the roadside... how different am I from them?

Is it because I have a roof over my head? Is it the clothes? I could lie to myself and say that is the reason but no. Darling, you and I know anything could happen in the next one minute, one day, one week or one year and I'd be in that same situation. That thought is uncomfortable because it forces me to admit something I rarely want to think about. The distance between "them" and "us" is not always as wide as we convince ourselves it is. Sometimes it is a single unfortunate event. A job lost. A family broken. A sickness. Addiction. A war. A mind that slowly gives in to battles no one else can see. Life has a strange way of reminding us that certainty is never guaranteed.

Perhaps that is why I find it difficult to convince myself that we are entirely different. Circumstances may separate us today, but circumstances are some of the most fragile things we possess. The life I enjoy today is a blessing, yes, but it is also one that I did not entirely build on my own. There are people who loved me before I knew how to love myself. There are people who opened doors for me, corrected me, prayed for me and believed in me. There are opportunities that came my way simply because someone gave me a chance. When I think about it deeply enough, I realise how much of my life rests on grace.

Because you know what? Those people are not any different from you and I dear reader. Not in the least. They laugh. They cry. They remember. They dream. They carry stories that most of us will never hear. They are human beings before they are homeless. Before they are labelled as "street children", "mad people" or "beggars", they are somebody's child. Somebody's sibling. Somebody's friend. Somebody whose life simply took a turn that perhaps even they never imagined.

And no, I do not mean the luxurious advantage over someone else.

Many of them no longer have the privilege of a stable support system. They don't have the privilege of a job. They don't have the privilege of affording the middle-class way of living or even the low class. Some have lost the people who once cared for them. Others have no one left to turn to. Whatever their story, each one carries a burden that most of us will never fully know.

See, even them, they are special. Special in the sense that life uses them to show the vulnerability and fragility of existence. They are the equilibrium. They remind us that none of us stand outside life's uncertainty.

But tell me something my gentle reader, you don't think they wish things were different? You don't think they also see you while passing by with your shopping bags, your big vehicles and brand new attires and wonder what it would take to be you? What it costs to be a human being blessed enough to just have a bed to lay your body, a little cash to afford the day's food and maybe a little more to buy the luxuries of life?

Every time I pass by them, I send them love, a short prayer and ask God to protect them. Because even the ones who have stayed long in the streets for so long, that they've forgotten what a home looks like, they have a protector. They have someone higher than you, I and them who watches after them. Such that during the heaviest of rains, the worst of wars and the darkest of nights they still see the light of a new day. Just like myself, just like yourself.

Perhaps that is what I walked away with that evening. Not pity. Not guilt. Just gratitude. Gratitude that today I have somewhere to return to. Gratitude that someone knows my name. Gratitude that tonight I will sleep in a bed. Those are ordinary things until you realise that for someone else they are prayers waiting to be answered.

If there is one thing I hope you take away from this: it is that you are more than blessed, my reader. You are so much privileged, to be where you are at this moment. Don't you ever forget that or take it lightly.