Full disclosure – I’ve done yoga a full two times now. Not nearly enough to consider myself a yogi,
but whether or not you’ve ever practiced yoga, you’re surely familiar with its
foundational greeting: Namaste. I’ve
heard it hundreds of times before, but I’ll confess I never knew what it meant,
nor did I care. After a tiny bit of
research, I discovered that, in Hinduism, Namaste means “I bow to the divine in
you.” Nice, but a little hippy dippy for
my lizard brain to see the beauty in. But a couple of months ago, I stumbled
across Glennon Doyle Melton's interpretation, and it is just so beautiful, I haven’t been able
to shake it. “Namaste: the God in me sees
and honors the God in you.”
God is in all of us – the same amount of God, innately in
all of us. The Pope was born with no
more and no less God in him than a gang member on the south side of Chicago. Stop and think about that. God says we are all His children, and God is
in each and every one of us. Take the
time to let that sink in, because this is powerful. In this world that is so desperate to divide
us into Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, good and bad, US and THEM, we
are all the same, because God is in each and every one of us.
So I tried it. I
walked around for a day, trying to be really conscious about finding the God in
other people. Though I’m not proud to
say it, it is pretty easy for me to come across at least 17 different kinds of
annoying people in my day-to-day life, and yet, even I, when I was REALLY
looking, was able to see the God in people.
All people.
It’s not a cure-all.
My instinct is still to be annoyed by a minimum of 75% of people I meet
on the regular. But if you really,
really look, I promise you’ll see it. In
the Republicans. In the Democrats. In the rich and in the poor. In the good and in the bad. In US and in THEM. And the more you look, and the more you find
it, the more instinctual it will become.
We’ll start to see it without even looking. And if that isn’t the way to create a more
beautiful, more peaceful world around us, I don’t know what is.
Try it. I believe you
can do it. The God in me sees and honors
the God in you. Namaste.
