OUR VIEW: Everyone deserves chance at own story

art+by+Esther+Neufeld

art by Esther Neufeld

Everyone is a story, and these stories don’t sit on a bookshelf collecting years’ worth of dust, but rather they demand to be read from cover to cover and heard loud and clear.

He sits alone in the unknown, black night with a bottle of alcohol in both of his trembling hands and the words “Only numbness can fix me,” drift out of his broken and desperate body.

She sits in her room with black, mascara tears rolling down her face as she struggles for her last breath with a scarlet-edged knife in hand.

He questions everything he’s ever known as he walks into the school for the last time with a gun in his backpack ready to end his life and destroy those who caused him unbearable pain.

We read about fractions of a person’s story, a person who sees no hope,  only a shattered future of uncontainable despair. We should ask ourselves what happened at the beginning of their stories and what will happen on the final pages. We feel these stories in the recesses of our own hearts. What have we done to rewrite the stories of these lives?

Yes, stories of all people, even the broken, demand to heard, and people–the nature of humanity–demand to be loved. People desire to be loved. People want to be loved in such a way that there is no mistake of their worth and value. However, this is often not the case. We quickly forget there is more to a person’s story than the current page, going on with our own selfish lives, ignoring the ones who are most desperate for a little bit of care.  As a society, we have become immune to tragic stories, following them as if they are a video game or movie, instead of a preventable horror. We light up for a mere second when we do actually hear a story of hope and redemption, then fall back to continue what we were doing unchanged and unaffected.  We pretend to be immune when it comes to things that touch us in ways we’ve never felt before. We act as if those crying out for help can mend themselves, and then dust off our shoulders hoping we don’t get dragged in to the problems of others.

Instead of loving the unlovable, we shun them into a cold place where self-harm and acts of violence seem to be the only answer. Then we turn our heads the other way to see who else is to blame. We ignore the fact that sometimes we become the problem, but even greater than that, we ignore the fact that many times we can be the solution.

We may make the claim that we do love people, but it has to be more visible, more abundant and more tangible. Love people more than you say you do.

Love people in your home. Love people in the hallway of school. Love people in the aisle at the grocery store and in the right turn lane at the stop light. Go out of your way to ensure that people feel important and know they are loved. Show extraordinary kindness to all people, all the time. Take the time to read everyone’s story- cover to cover. Read every word and listen intently when someone decides to share his or her personal story with you. People demand to be loved, so love them genuinely. People’s stories demand to be heard and read, especially when we can help them be stories of hope and triumph instead of tragedy and despair.