There Once was a Man...

There once was a man who wore his sins as chains, a shackle hung from his right wrist and whenever he moved his left leg you could hear the clink, clink, clink, of those steel links. Two guards sat with him always...for his offense was not petty. Innocence had been stolen and dreams were crushed beneath the weight of his choices.

He’d been hurt and in turn he’d hurt others.

Broken little people, growing up to be big broken people who hurt and shatter the lives of other little people.

My mother always told me, “Ming, hurt people, hurt people." The older I get, the more I'm finding out how right she was...

I glanced as his face and I saw a little boy who’d been hurt and had turned the pain inward until it devoured all of his hopes and dreams.

I saw a man who swallowed whispered lies, a man who fed a desire that he believed would bring him satisfaction, and I saw a old man with chains of his own making wrapped around his ankle.

I saw the dragon sneer an ugly grin as he devoured it all. Chomp. Chomp. Chomp. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.

I looked at him….and I saw myself, for what are we but mirrors of each other?

"Guilty of one, guilty of all," is a nice turn of phrase when you sit in a church pew, next to people who look pretty on the outside, and piously bow your head.

But just for a moment…slide close to the murderer, the prostitute with dull eyes, and the child molester…sidle up next to the man with yellow skin and needle marks up and down his arms and sit next to the man who’s lying in the gutter reeking of urine and beer--bend down close enough to see their broken story and see yours there too... Look at them, broken, shattered pieces of humanity and realize that’s all you are too.

Put a gun in our hands at the right moment, pointed at the right person, and we would all pull the trigger.

We are all broken, shattered. We are all born and we all die. And as we slip into the atmosphere we all scream with new and aching lungs.

We call the architects of the massive pain and suffering, monsters, we try and dehumanize them, put them in a category and draw a line that separates us from them.

But look, I beg you. See them for what they really are.

What are they? Human.

What are we? Human.

Fall on your knees.

But for the grace of God, there go I.

Guilty of one, guilty of all.

Watered down grace will not work here, only the real stuff will do.