"Put yourself in their shoes." We hear it so often, but it can catch us by surprise when we see someone else in our shoes. When all of a sudden you can relate to someone else without even trying. You see part of you that you thought no one else understood, and someone's there who gets it.
We tend to think that we are very unique. For creatures who are constantly trying to be understood, we don't seem to believe anyone ever can understand us. It's a paradox that we don't always notice. But I think it's one of the reasons people are so beautiful: we are forgetful and hopeful. At our core, we all want to be understood, but we all want to be different and unique at the same time.
Like most people, I think I am unique and pretty different from everyone else. I have lived in unique places (a reality for a missionary kid), I have interesting parents (like I said, missionaries, it's fun), I chose a different church than the one I was raised in to be baptized in, I have a special taste in music, books, and food. At the end of the day, I am just like everyone else: amazingly uniquely average. But I tend to focus on the unique part.
So when it happened, I had to take a step back. I never expect anyone to understand what I go through. But there it was, another 20-year-old being baptized. A few days later, I meet another missionary kid from Estonia. Then another girl who loves to eat Indian food while listening to folk music. I felt my uniqueness falling away. I hadn't realized that I was common, that there had to be hundreds of people with identical taste and similar life stories. And where does that leave me, was I no longer unique?
It left me star-struck. It left me giddy. I wasn't alone, someone else knew my exact pain with converting to a new church, and someone else know the exact homesickness that I felt for both my American home and my parent's missionary home. I looked around and I saw so many people who had walked a few miles in my shoes and survived and thrived and completely loved it, and it made me feel great. I hadn't realized before this Easter when I saw so many other people being baptized, going through just what I had gone through the year before, that I was normal. I hadn't realized until I was a teenager and began to meet other missionary kids that I was average. But as a quiet kid, reading my books and drinking my sugar-loaded tea, thinking I was the only one like me in the world, I never could have imagined how much my perspective would change. I could never have known how comforting it was that no matter how average I became, I would always have my niche, the collection of things jumbled together that made me, and no matter how unique I became, I would always be able to find someone else who had walked a few miles in my shoes.
