I remember being at David’s Tent one year and looking around at all the Jesus-loving worshippers. Jesus had been talking to me about how I see Him most clearly when I see Him corporately. There’s a truth and a deep preciousness in alone time with Jesus, and our relationship with Him should be built on it. However, I’ve learned that we each only have one set of eyes and that each pair of eyes has their own story: their own process for viewing the world and their own unique way of seeing. If God is really as wide and deep and unending as He says He is, my own set of eyes will never come close to fathoming Him. Not even in eternity. However, I’ve learned that when I take a moment to look through someone else’s eyes, I see a side of God that I would never have otherwise.

I can’t express how this changed the way I viewed the world. I started to realise that every single person has eyes that no one else has, and that that makes them immeasurably valuable. It means that every person I get to spend 3 seconds with can show me things about the world and life and their way of seeing it that no one else can. It made me value conversations in a new, deep and sweet way when I realised that God is actually revealing His character through every single person He ever created.

selah that.

If my one goal and highest purpose is to be close to Jesus, than this is huge. It’s funny. I’m learning and re-learning in new ways that waking and sleeping with the simple passion to be close to Jesus doesn’t keep me from closeness to other people, it actually draws me to them.

I recently found a new favourite artist called Dermot Kennedy, who has an album called Sonder. I had no idea what sonder meant, so I did the only reasonable thing and Googled it. I found it’s definition to be: “The profound feeling of realising that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are living constantly despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.” Goodness me. I love that. I don’t know who made that word a thing, but they put in a word the feeling that I’m trying to describe. It’s sonder. The realisation that every single person has a deep and wild and complex story that only they have. And that that give’s them a perspective that only they have. And that that gives them an angle of seeing Jesus that only they have.

That’s huge.

It makes me want to hear everyone’s stories. It makes me want to learn present-ness and let the people around me know that what they have to share is precious. That their voice is unique and poweful.

I love that verse in Rev 12:11, “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony…”

What if your story has the power to set other people free? And more than that. What if someone else’s story has the power to set you free? What if the things we learn about God and life and love through sharing our stories is how we overcome in this life? What if it’s somebody else’s story that reveals something about the nature of God to you that causes that lie you’ve been believing to come crashing to the grave? What if it’s your story that causes someone else to know that there’s a God who died for them?

Idk. I think there’s more to this whole sonder thing than I’ve begun to grasp.

But, for now, I’ll let it make me want to listen to every person’s story that I get to. And I’ll keeping listening through Sonder, because it’s doing something in me.