My time in Chicago reminded me how isolated we choose to be in our every day lives. This great city is full of motion. It’s so easy to hide in the constant unceasing movement, the big vibrant world, the buzzing ambiance of daily activities. I found myself choosing to be just another face, another passenger, another stranger. But something startling happens when you start to willingly disappear, when we all do, it’s like we become part of the machines that are taking us here and there. We fade into the ambient buzz buzz buzzing of the engines. It’s a beautifully tragic orchestration, quite like staring at a painting of ourselves. We do see one another, but we never see the dimensions, the space between formalities. So much movement, so many faces, so many souls, and somehow we have chosen to reduce ourselves to passengers. But my heart beats angrily at even the thought, because surely we can be defined among each other as more than mere passengers? Although, that would require that we engage deeply, and I dare say most of us are ready for that. I’d like to say that I realized this then, while riding on the train, and I woke up from my mechanic slumber and began making friends. Interacting. Loving others. Talking about the good news that has changed my life. Reaching. Listening. Learning. But the truth is that I kept riding. In fact, it’s only as I sat down to write about how great my trip to Chicago was, that I realized how much greater it could have been. I realized that a lot of my time there was spent alone. It seems odd, at first, that in a city of nearly 3 million people, such a feat was possible. But that’s before you really think about the natural tendency of humans, of strangers. As humans, we have the uncanny ability of hiding in plain sight. I feel like that’s what we do best in the giant overwhelming world of the metropolis. I wish I had sat and talked with others, learned something about their lives, told them things about mine. For no other reason than because, for a moment, we were both there, blending into the hum of the busy world, two invisible people with nothing better to do than to meet. We face a lot of challenges on a daily basis. But I’d like to add one more to your list, if you’re willing. I’d like to challenge us all to engage in our community, in our brothers and sisters, in our humanity. You might learn things from sitting on the side lines, in fact I can testify that you do learn quite a bit, but there’s something life changing about actually playing the game. There are plenty of things in this world to be afraid of, but if there’s one thing I learned from Chicago, it’s this: please, don’t be afraid to share your heart. You might be moving, but you’re not living unless you’re sharing your heart.
