What If We Decide Everyone Matters?

I wore a shirt yesterday that is one of my favorites. You have to understand, while I don't think I'm that into clothes, I'm a bit of a t-shirt junkie, constantly having to retool my closet and give away shirts to make room for new ones. Thankfully, my job allows me to get my money's worth on most of them. The shirt I have on right now has become one of my favorites, one I wear a lot. On the front, in English and Spanish both, it says "What If We Decide Everyone Matters?" It was the motto for a new church plant in Baltimore a couple of years ago. Before launch, the church took out billboards and signs on city transportation with that simple statement, "What If We Decide Everyone Matters?" When I ran across it in a newsletter i was reading a couple of years ago, it really intrigued me. I got in contact with the church and purchased a shirt from them. I love wearing it in public because it always attracts people's interest, as it well should. I think it is something that should be the motto of every church and every Christ follower, the idea of conveying and living out the truth that EVERY person matters, or as Martin Luther King Jr. once stated, "Everybody is somebody because he is a child of God." There is intrinsic value in every created person. Only humanity is created in the image of the Creator. Only we bear His image. God took incredible care to fashion and to shape each one of us as part of His Masterpiece creation.

Unfortunately, and sadly, we spend far too much of our time living just the opposite of this. We spend our time, energy, words and effort trying to build ourselves up and put others down. We step on people to get to the top. We mistreat others to get our own way. Somehow, somewhere, between young childhood and teen years, something changes and we quit believing everyone matters. We become race-minded, class-minded, ethnicity-minded, belief-minded, and more, and we forget that most basic of values, the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have done to you." We spend our time trying to put others in their place at our own expense and we become selfish. Though we wouldn't dare say it, we live as if WE are the only ones that matter. I saw this play out in a very painful way recently while we were on vacation. I was wearing this same shirt, and when I went downstairs in our hotel to get food from the lobby to take back up to our room, an already tipsy lady was gazing at my shirt trying to read it. She read it out loud, to nobody in particular, and as soon as she said, "What if we decide everyone matters," she followed without stopping by saying "Well, we're not gonna do that, are we?" and then, perhaps realizing how harsh it sounded, tried to play it off as if she were joking. But you can't really take something like that back, can you? It broke my heart...how do you respond to that. Inside I rolled my eyes, but on the outside, I just smiled a weak, fake smile and carried on with getting my food.

I've reflected a lot on that for the past few days. Usually it's not THAT vividly expressed, but don't we live like that, subconsciously at least, far too frequently? I mean, if we REALLY decided everyone matters, wouldn't it change us, motivate us to move outside of ourselves and to help others a lot more, instead of acting as if they somehow did something to deserve it, at least compared to us? Maybe in some cases they did...but in many instances, it simply is the luck of the draw, the family they were born into, the place they were born, the life situations they inherited beyond their control. Wouldn't it be much more world-changing for us to really live with a 'there but for the grace of God go I' attitude, realizing each of us is merely a few choices or life circumstances from being in the same place? Didn't Jesus decide everyone mattered to Him, no matter their situation or status? What IF we decided, and lived out, the same? Lord, give us YOUR eyes, and your heart...