Just thinking again.....

Late last week I posted that I was feeling pretty empty headed and needed to take a break. The holiday gave me that. It was a great time of rest, being with family and spending some time with friends and my dear wife.

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I must admit that my drug of choice is people. I love being with people. One of our men in the church came up to me after the sermon yesterday and said, "You are a weaver (I had spoken on weaving thanksgiving into our lives), you weave through the lives of people and make a difference in their lives." I took that comment as high praise, and I know he meant it that way.

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So today I am thinking....what is it that we all need so badly in our lives? What is it that is so necessary for us? I am convinced it is a "people fix." We each need the touch, the ear, the presence of other people to live. We can't live this life alone, we need others to thrive.

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I read an article about the orphanages in Russia in years past, and the problems they were having with infant deaths. Their newborn mortality rate was really high. They discovered that the solution to the problem was to schedule a time each day for these newborn babies to be held, loved and talked to. So they put in place a regular schedule of holding, loving and talking to each baby. The mortality rates dropped dramatically and the babies actually looked forward to and anticipated their 10 minutes of attention each day. We, as adults, are no different. We need attention. We need a "people fix."

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But there is more, and here's where I think it gets hard...people don't just need time, they need someone who really cares about them, who will really listen, who will be interested in them. That's much harder because we find our lives so busy with "me" how do we dedicate the time to others that they need? It's one of the great deserts of our culture- people who will care for each other, and invest in one another's lives. For most of us, when we find it, it's like finding water in the desert, we just want to linger and drink in all we can...all the attention and love we can get because we are so needy, so thirsty....and that's where it gets hard. Like those babies who just needed some attention, we all look for someone to pay attention to us, and when we find them we hold on....not realizing that they need attention, time and care as well. Without realizing it we often run off the very people we most need.

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So, like the Russian orphanage system, let me advocate we build into our lives a regular diet of investing in the lives of others. We all need it, we all hunger for it, why do we so neglect it? One of the couples we visited with over the weekend were talking about this very thing- why is it so hard to find friends? They invite people over for dinner, coffee or just time to play games, but no one ever does that for them. They feel the need, but our culture doesn't make it easy. I think we could fix a lot of our problems if we all scheduled 15 minutes a day to sit on our front porches and just visit with the neighbors....we all need our "people fix", it's part of the human hunger. Might I challenge you to schedule this into your life and make people important?

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They are what God is most interested in.....