The Power of People

People are always talking about the power of God, the universe, and whatever else, but people very rarely talk about the power of people. I'm not discrediting the power of God or the universe. I'm just saying that people make up most of the power we see around us.

A couple years ago, I went on a mission trip to Jamaica. It was a wonderful experience. However, I am not a religious person and don't really care all that much about whatever God's doing or if he/she's doing anything. I'll just do what I'm going to do and God can do whatever it wants.

At the end of each day, we'd sit in a circle and discuss how we saw God in action. While it was easy enough to come up with a suitable answer, I hadn't seen God in action. I'd seen people in action. The things that the other people were saying were all examples of what people had done. They'd sight making all the little kids at the elementary school smile or someone painting a third of the room by themselves as examples. While I don't really care if God gets the credit, it should at least should be noted that people made these things happen.

It was us letting little children molest our heads and jump on our stomachs that made them smile. (Also the fact that we were the only white people they'd ever seen.) It was our drive to paint the building that got the job done that made the teachers thankful. Mostly it's just people affecting people.

Everyone that a person comes in contact with is has an effect. People make things happen or keep things from happening. It is people that are behind bombings and people that are behind pulling others out of the wreckage.

While not every interaction's as big as painting a school or even traveling to Jamaica they are still there and do have an impact.

Over Thanksgiving, I traveled to my sister's place in Fort Collins for a family gathering of more people than was likely safe. Getting there was interesting. I was riding the bus system. Catching my first and second bus was smooth sailing.

Then, traffic got balled up and an incredibly nice, but confused fellow got on the wrong bus. The bus driver, being super awesome, pulled around the block and dropped the confused guy off and we continued on.

As we got closer and closer to the place where I needed to catch my next bus, I noticed the bus wasn't going to make it in time to catch the conjoining one. I'd have to wait for three hours until the next one came. I texted my sister and told her I wasn't going to make it in time and was completely prepared to wait around.

All the other passengers were squirming in their seats as well. Checking how close to the bus stop we were, checking the time, and in general just being anxious. Everyone started discussing feverishly that they weren't going to make the bus. That's when the bus driver decided to be awesome!

Instead of following his normal designated route, he cut across the conjoining streets and headed straight for the stop we all needed. He said "screw you" to the speed limit and floored the bus to the best of his abilities. He pulled right in front of the bus we were trying to catch and we all scrambled out and ran to the connecting one just as it was about to leave.

That bus driver is in my record as being one of the most awesome people I have ever met. (Sadly, I don't know his name though.) He instead of just doing his job as he was payed to do it, he did it in a personalized way. He actually cared about who bothered to set foot on the bus. Not deeply or anything, but he actually cared that we were people and that we needed to get places.

No amount of praying, hoping, or chanting would have made me catch the connecting bus if we didn't have that bus driver. It wasn't achieved by the grace of God. It was achieved by the grace of people. The nervousness of missing their bus that produced the chatter and the driver pushing the rules to the side is what made us catch that bus. Nothing else.

It is people that make things happens. Maybe outside forces such as bugs and weather affect what people make happen, but it's still the people that make the memories of cockroach dances, and filming in the rain happen.

So people, here's what you've got to do. Pat you're self on the back. You make things happen. Even you sitting on the couch eating Cheetos makes the cushion flatter. Give yourselves some credit and give it to the people around you. It's not God that made you rich; it's your hard work (or maybe your rich parent's hard work) that made you rich. It's not God that made your wife leave; it's your drinking problem.

Stop blaming things on and giving other people's credit to a giant possibly non-existent person in the sky.