Am I in the Penn bubble? When I'm at LIFT, that question recedes from my consciousness. The men and women I work with are as far from a Penn student as one can get. Most come from a disadvantaged background. Most have completed high school, but few have gone on to college. The jobs they search for—titles like housekeeper, office assistant, line cook—are concentrated at the lower echelons of employment.
You feel it, too, right? That sense of guilt or uncomfortableness as you tell your burger or sandwich order to the sweaty man at Houston or Cosi? When we've reached a certain maturity level, these thoughts and nagging questions are unavoidable.
In my first post about suffering I mentioned how people matter to God. To extend this idea(and to plagiarize from P. Dave a little more...), once we come to terms with this fact, we can't look at people the same way anymore. We start to see the man who cuts our bologna at FroGro differently. We begin to appreciate the grouchy ladies who serve breakfast at Common and/or Hill. We are led to sympathy for the shivering homeless man on Walnut trying to bum a cigarette. These people matter to God: they are precious in His sight.
You'll ask, if God is so loving, why are there homeless? But as I discussed in Suffering, pt. 1, we are not in a position to judge God. We don't know the consequential effects of suffering on this earth. All we can do is trust that there is an answer to these difficult moral questions and do the best we can to rectify the inequalities we see.
I think we ask these difficult moral questions partly because we want to make sense of the world, but also because of a more selfish reason. We want to make sense of the homeless man's situation through our own logic—our own natural way of looking at the world. We want him to validate our already foregone conclusions: that God doesn't exist or that He doesn't care.
I don't think it's productive to think about suffering in this way. It's unfair to those who are actually suffering—the homeless man, for example. He doesn't exist for our purposes or interpretations. It's too easy—too reductive—to speculate about how the cleaning lady ended up mopping floors or how the clerk ended up stuffing mailboxes and conclude that either 1) they didn't try hard enough or 2) God doesn't exist.
Some of the most important people in our lives are those we will hardly speak a word to. They are all around us. Trash-collectors. Hairdressers. Cashiers. If you can treat these people as critical to your life, then it's not hard to see the woman or man in front of you at the grocery check-out line as important.
Sometimes, we pay more attention to our iPhones or Blackberries than the people in front of us serving our food. We're too busy plugging in and tuning out the rest of the world. Too busy loving ourselves that we forget about others. Too busy living out our own hopes and dreams at the cost of encouraging others to pursue their own.
Even if you disagree with me, you'll admit there is something strange about valuing a mere assemblage of metal and plastic over a living, breathing human being.
We are supposed to care. Sometimes, it's the hardest thing in the world. But deep down, we know the truth—it's important.
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