Quite Often Our Importance Isn't Ours At All

​We'd barely begun our conversation when Shawn looked into the screen and told me, "Keith, you're the most important person I've ever met".

Those words, they were overwhelming.

Confusing.

Part of me wanted to embrace and celebrate the feeling of being a most important person while another part couldn't begin to reconcile the notion of feeling important with the me who often can't begin to.

It had been over a year since I'd met Shawn. I hadn't seen or talked to him since our first and only encounter. Shawn was in a 3-day training I led helping people understand the biology, science, and resilience stories connected to their childhood experiences stories.

I almost cancelled that training because it was such a small group. But something in me said do it. Yesterday, I drew closer to that something.

In the training, I learned that Shawn had spent 15 years in prison. Shawn broke down in tears a few times in our training as he started to understand the stories beneath his prison stories, as he started to see and feel himself as something more than a recovering prisoner.

Quite often in life we aren't looking to have our actions excused, but rather, to have those actions understood as something deeper than the actions themselves.

Actions are easy to judge; judgment requires no effort at all, really. Understanding and compassion on the other hand, that requires effort, quite often it calls on the very souls of our humanity.

But that's often where grace comes from, where forgiveness is born. Not the least of which is the grace and forgiveness we can ultimately begin to offer ourselves. Believe me when I tell you, when I heard Shawn's childhood stories, prison seemed far more a given than a shocker.

Shawn connected with me yesterday to tell me he'd been going back to prisons since our training to help other inmates understand in prison what he didn't come to understand until many years after he got out.

He said, I teach them the same way you taught me.

He said, "Keith, when I get there, they are all cussing and fussing at me because I'm there to give them one more stupid training, but once I get to talking, many of them start to cry."

Shawn said his talk has begun to connect so widely that he's now having a hard time keeping up with all the opportunities to speak and teach.

He wasn't complaining.

He went on to tell me that he uses a picture of his little baby in his presentations like I used a picture of my baby Elliott in mine. His is a picture of his little baby girl who was born just after Shawn went to prison, a little baby girl his parents adopted because of some struggles the mom was having as well as Shawn's absence, a little baby girl who recently earned her pharmaceutical technician certification.

Shawn told me, little baby Elliott changed my life and I've never met him.

As we were finishing up our conversation, I told Shawn, "I didn't want to have that training back then when I met you, but I did and it changed my life like it did yours." Then I told him, "I didn't want to have baby Elliott all those years ago, but I did and he changed my life like he did yours."

I told Shawn, maybe I'm the most important person you've ever met, but my importance doesn't come from me. It comes from the one who knows what's important better than I often do. It comes from the one who keeps pushing me toward the importance that I sometimes fail to embrace.

It comes from the one who ABSOLUTELY sees equal value in the prisoner and in me.

I told Shawn, maybe I'm the most important person you've ever met, but I assure you, I'm not even a hint more important than you.

I have been assured of that by the most important person I've ever met.