We Are All in This Together

Melbourne Harbor, Australia

Space travel these days is nowhere near as popular in the public eye as it was when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Today, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is sure helping these efforts as he tweets from the International Space Station (ISS) several times a day. Before he blasted off from Kazakhstan on December 19, Hadfield had 20,000 Twitter followers and today he has over 283,000. I have really appreciated the view from space through his pictures and his short 140 character or less tweets. From the spectacular view of the volcanoes at Mt. Taranaki in New Zealand to the harbor in Melbourne, Australia, Chris is giving us a spectacular view of earth from the ISS. The fact that he can tweet from space and I can read it on my mobile phone moments later still amazes me and I assume this has drawn many of the 249,000 who follow him.

One of his tweets in particular a few weeks ago inspired me and has encouraged me down here on earth:

“The world just unrolls itself for you and you see it absolutely discreetly as one place.”

This statement spurs me into thinking a few things:

1. We are all in this thing called life together, all 7 billion of us
2. The sooner we can love our neighbours as ourselves and set aside our differences, the quicker the distance between us all will decrease

Today our world is divided by so many factors. Language, race, religion, gender, socio-economic status and many other factors. While some of these we are born with or born into, others we will eventually have a say in how they play out in our lives.  In my travels around the world and through my career working with people affected by homelessness and poverty I have witnessed firsthand the wide gap between the rich and poor and between the developed and developing world. I see people on the streets of downtown Calgary scurry by the gentleman begging for lunch money or the young lady caught up in prostitution who is only trying to survive in this fast paced and expensive city. When I see them I am reminded of the successful man I met who made $200k+ a year and lost his wife and children in a car accident and could not return to ‘life’. He ended up losing his home, his job and felt abandoned by his friends as they struggled to support him with his newly diagnosed mental health concerns. I am also reminded of a young lady I knew well who hated the reality of sex work but did so to make ends meet and survive the only way she knew how. As she was starting to turn things around in her life unfortunately she was tragically murdered. A close friend said once “these are our mothers and fathers; our brothers and sisters; our sons and daughters.” You see each person is one or many of those. They are a precious person made in God’s own image and they are not only living in our downtown cores or in poorer neighbourhoods, they are living next door to you, across the hall from you and likely in your very own family.

When I have the privilege to speak and educate the public on the issues of poverty and homelessness, I challenge each one from kindergarten to graduate studies that the answers for these issues lay in our hands, in our mouths and in our time. We each need to take a step back and realise that we live in our neighbourhoods right now for a time such as this. We need not travel abroad to see and help brokenness; all we need to do is look out our back window and find practical ways to love our neighbour as ourselves. These efforts will break down borders and fences we put up to keep the those who are different from ourselves or those who make us feel uncomfortable in our society and will help us realize that we are all in this thing called life together, all 7 billion of us.

Byron Bradley, Student Engagement Coordinator, The Mustard Seed
Twitter: @sportsguyB                                                                                                                                        

Follow Chris Hadfield on Twitter @Cmdr_Hadfield

 

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