My wife and I just finished watching a documentary called "The Human Experience" (http://www.grassrootsfilms.com/thehumanexperience/), about a group of guys who travel to various destinations throughout the world in search of answers to questions like, "who am I?who is man? and why do we search for meaning?" Their experiences range from living among the homeless of New York City to visiting a leper colony in Africa. This film is powerful! The people they meet along the way are inspiring and show the resiliency of the human spirit, yet their stories are also heartbreaking in many ways.
As I watched this film I began thinking about how often our lack of perspective can keep us in a place of feeling depressed about my life and always looking inward at the things that we feel are deficits in our lives. What struck me as I watched the sick and handicapped kids in Peru and the lepers in Africa, was how grateful they were just to have life. Although in many ways it seems like they got the short end of the stick, I began to see more life in them than I think most people experience on a daily basis. This really reminded me of how fortunate I am, how much I take for granted, and made me think deeply about the issues I've struggled with in my life.
Anyway, without getting lost in my own experience of this movie, one of the main things I took away was how a change in perspective can really bring about lasting change in our lives. Whether it's traveling to a third-world country or just being with the less fortunate in our cities, I believe that we can achieve some lasting therapeutic change by stepping out of our comfortable bubbles and moving closer to people who seem to have less comfortable lives than us. We might even find that they are more comfortable and happier than we are!
I know that I experience much joy when serving others and feel that there is the potential that a change in our perspectives might also bring about a lasting change for the pathologies we all experience. So my challenge to you is this: if you're feeling down, sad, anxious, lonely, bored, fearful, etc., step out and seek out a place where you can regularly experience this life-giving change in perspective.
To find opportunities in Denver that might be a good place to gain these types of experiences, visit www.volunteermatch.org. Three places that are especially dear to my heart and places I believe provide strong reward and change in perspectives are:
- The Denver Rescue Mission (http://www.denverrescuemission.org/volunteer)
- Park Forest Care Center (http://www.parkforestcarecenter.com/index.html)
- Mean Street Ministry (http://www.meanstreetministry.org/)
