“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.” (Marcus Aurelius). With how different we are from those around us, and with how incredibly difficult it can be to set aside such differences and work together for a common good, it sometimes seems like God has a sadistic sense of humor and is just gleefully watching us lose our little minds as we get angrier and angrier that the whole world seems bound and determined to contradict and to thwart us at every turn. But this is not all some sick joke. God was very deliberate when he gave each of us specific gifts and talents and temperaments and predilections. All of our strengths are not only for our own benefit. All of our flaws aren’t only to make everyone else’s life harder. We might wish everyone were just like us, but if we got our wish, we would be in trouble because there would be no one to make up for all of the flaws and weaknesses that we have. The hand might wish that the foot was more versatile and dexterous and the foot might wish the hand was strong enough to bear being walked on all day long, but we actually really need both our hands and our feet. It is true that every day when we wake up, we will more than likely be given a reason to resent and rage at someone for being mean or cruel or thoughtless or spiteful or lazy or dishonest with us. It is also true that we will most likely do at least some of those things to someone else. There’s no way around it. But it is also true that on any given day, we will have the opportunity to bless someone’s life, even if for no other reason than the fact that they are happy we are alive and would be deeply saddened if we were no longer here. We can’t always see the negative or the positive effects that we have on other people, just like we only get the smallest of glimpses of the effects, both positive and negative, that others have on us. Even if we are frustrated and disillusioned with the flaws and failures of every other person on earth, and even if we work incredibly hard to structure our life in such a way that we never have to rely on anyone for anything so that no one ever has to hurt or betray or let us down ever again, that is not why we are here. We were born to work together. Not just because it’s good for us or it builds character or because by having the humility to work with others will show that we are righteous or worthy of love, but because even though the connections aren’t always completely smooth or harmonious, despite all appearances we actually do in fact mesh together like cogs in a machine. A gear that is perfectly formed, and is exact in its timing, but a gear that does not actually touch any of the other gears is not doing any work. We have to be in each other’s lives, as unpleasant and frustrating as that so often is, because it’s the only way that we are ever going to get anything done. Being resentful is like throwing sand in the gearworks. It’s worse than useless. But by forgiving and loving others and ourselves, despite all of our flaws and despite how poorly we sometimes mesh together, we pour in the oil of Christ’s grace to smooth out any irregularities or gaps in the gears and everything can continue running along and working together just as we were always designed to do. One day we will have the scales lifted from our eyes and we will all gape in wonder at the perfect harmony that God was able to create from all of our imperfect parts working together.
