Every single encounter in our lives is sacred.
How do we greet people we meet on our daily path?
Do we act with impatience? Are we in a hurry to get to wherever we feel we must rush to that the other person becomes a "nuisance" or "inconvenience"; an object to be shooed away because we have more "important" things to attend to?
What is so important that we need to cause hurt to another being?
Are we going to take this "more important" business, whatever it happens to be, with us when we die? Will it have any importance whatsoever then or will we die regretting the way we treated other people in our lives; the way we held resentments and grudges, the way we neglected others and the harm we did unknowingly, the lost opportunities to say "I love you" and "you matter to me", all because we were in a hurry, rushing to some "more important" destination?
When we look back at our lives, will we discover that we employed our power for the higher good or misused it in negativity, neglect and hatred, conflict and vengeance, self-centredness and greed, chasing all the unimportant things?
Did we honour people and help them feel good about themselves or cut them down to size and walk past?
Did we ignore others who really needed our support and attention, all because we "had" to meet a deadline, or we were running late, rushing to make dinner or put out the washing?
We seem to forget the important things in life and get caught up in the system of the world. There would be no world, as we know it, without people!
Do we ever step off the treadmill of daily living to really consider and evaluate our true priorities in life?
While we are busy being unconscious and self-centred, living in our own little world, people around us are hurting.
Our children are getting into fights, missing school, taking drugs and our partner is feeling ignored, stressed and depressed but, we close our eyes to all of this - we are too busy elsewhere and too tired to notice.
If we do notice, what is our response?
Give the children a good talking to, send them to rehab. Tell our partner to go and see a doctor for some pills or a psychologist - we don't need any more problems when we get home because we have enough to deal with at work!
So, the most important people in our lives, our families, become "another problem and another nuisance" to deal with!
What we fail to consider or take any responsibility for, is our own contribution to this state of affairs!
If people are constantly neglected, ignored, treated as if they do not matter and relegated to the end of our "to-do list" which we never get to because everything else has to come first, it is highly likely they will become depressed or end up taking drugs.
If life for us has become an endless cycle of rushing out of the door in the morning, coming back worn out and just sitting in front of the television all night long, not wanting to speak or listen and screaming at the children to be quiet at the slightest sound, then we are neglecting our most important priorities.
We fail to see that we are becoming the "nuisance and the problem" to our own families who are already overloaded with their own issues.
How are they now going to cope with our lack of attention or encouragement, without the person they look up to and who means the world to them, being able to listen to and help them feel that they matter and that somebody loves them?
Have we lost our minds? We have certainly lost our way!
We need to look at the effect we have on others and how we would like to be instead and take steps to reorder our priorities.
Our families and relationships with others need to be our number one priority because when we are on our deathbed, it won't be the office that will be sitting beside us. We won't be taking our deadlines, our board meetings or our overtime payments with us.
All we will take at the end of the day is the love that we have. So, if we have given and shared love in our lives, we will die very rich indeed. If we have chased worldly things instead, we will die poor, wondering what our life was all about!
Babies can die from neglect, flowers wither and die without water so let us put love at the top of our priority list and highlight it and ensure that, each day, we share it with the people in our lives because love is life.
When we love, we are literally breathing life into people, giving them courage, strength and joy to carry on living!
We need to spread love to everyone we come into contact with and leave them richer than they were before they encountered us.
The expression of love that we are, keeps the world going; it is what brightens someone's day, puts a smile on a child's face, restores someone's peace and faith, provides hope to someone in despair and saves someone's life!
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