Learning to be blown away by what we have in common

​Richard Rohr says this in his morning devotion:

"Once we know that God has inhabited all that God has created, then all of our distinctions are silly. They are just ways to create self-importance and superiority for ourselves and put down someone else. We’ve played this game since grade school!"

I wrote something yesterday along these lines, and a couple of folks commented it was sort of in your face. Well, these words this morning, they were sort of in mine.

These words this morning, they have me thinking about trail running. I LOVE running on trails. I've always said the trails are where I find my deepest spiritual connection. I've said it's where I feel one with God. It's where I feel and hear him.

More powerfully than ever, maybe, this morning I understand it.

When I'm in the woods, this unspoken conversation I have with the trees and the dirt on the trails and the birds that chirp and the squirrels that dart in front of me and then up those trees, this unspoken conversation I have with them all is "we are all the same."

God has created us all.

Nothing complicates that conversation. There is no thought about how we are different. No thought about how what one believes or does complicates my capacity to be what I believe and to do life as I was created to do it. I simply stay mesmerized by this common denominator that God created us all.

When you look at everything though the lens of what connects us, there is peace found in that.

Why do so many of us spend so much time these days feeling not at peace? Why do we spend so much time feeling disturbed and anxious and just flat out perturbed by so many of the people around us? It's because we spend so much time sorting through and identifying all the things that make us distinct, and how those distinctions complicate our own personal lives.

Today, what if we consider our walk through the people of life as a walk in the woods. Where we look around us in wonder, in amazement, that the God who loves and created me is the God who loves and created them? What if the walk in the woods that feels like an escape from life for me can be found in the life I try to escape simply by being grateful for that which we have in common.

I personally believe that is what we are here for in this life. It's a giant puzzle with which we are all challenged to discover our common thread. My optimism in life comes in believing that we all do indeed have a common thread. My hopelessness, many days, comes in seeing and feeling and being on the giving and receiving end of a world dead set on magnifying our differences.

But we can be the leaders in solving that puzzle.

You can and I can.

We can all take a walk through life today and simply be blown away by what we have in common. And to be moved to love one another like that commonality loves us.