Cybercolumn by Brett Younger: Sitting in someone else’s chair

Posted: 10/06/06

CYBER COLUMN:
Sitting in someone else’s chair

By Brett Younger

How do you react when you come to the kitchen table and someone is in your place? What happens when you walk into your office and find someone sitting in your chair? The way we respond says something about us. Some choose not to make a big deal out of it. We sit in another chair and try not to think about it, but all the while we feel strange sitting in someone else’s chair. Others respond more directly. We have no intention of giving up our place. We immediately say, “You’re in my chair. You need to move.” There must be a third category of people who are not only willing, but eager to sit in a different place and see from a different perspective, but the third group has to be the smallest.

Most of the time we have no desire to sit where others sit. We don’t want to know the people who sit elsewhere and think differently, because we like believing that our ideas are the best ideas. We divide the world into us and them. Like the Hatfields and McCoys, the Montagues and Capulets, we rarely question the lines—liberals and conservatives, educated and underprivileged, old and young, insiders and outsiders.

Doesn’t it feel awkward to walk into a home or a room or a church where everyone is something you’re not—a different race or the other gender or younger than you are? Do you unconsciously look for someone like you? We’re tempted to spend our lives looking for people like us. We too quickly become uncomfortable around people who aren’t like us.

If you said, “I think I met someone today who’s going to be a good friend,” would the people who know you best be able to guess how old your prospective friend is? Just by hearing that you’ve made a new friend, could we estimate how much money they make, how much education they have, or what religious beliefs they hold?

Self-centeredness is easier than compassion. Some rich people talk about the poor in a way that makes it obvious that they’ve never thought about what it’s like not to have a home. Some white people talk about people of color in a way that makes it clear that they’ve never imagined what it’s like to be a victim of prejudice. Some straight people talk about gay people in a way that leaves no doubt that they’ve never considered what it’s like to be gay. We have an obligation to keep asking what it’s like to be the other person.

This summer I was a counselor at children’s camp. Some of the adults at camp have so much trouble putting themselves in a child’s place that they cling to other adults. You know how if you’re in England and see someone wearing a Baylor T-shirt you feel compelled to introduce yourself, “Hi, I’m from Texas, too.” At children’s camp, it’s the same feeling, “Hi, I’m an adult, too.” After three days, I was begging adults to talk to me about anything that isn’t Harry Potter.

Except there are moments when God does help us understand. A sad little boy I didn’t know was walking back from the swimming pool by himself. I asked, “What church are you from?”

“I came with somebody else’s church.”

“Oh, so you had a buddy from that church.”

“Well, I thought I did.”

Do you remember what that feels like? What it’s like to be a child who left out?

It’s amazing what happens when we ask what it’s like to be someone else. What’s it like to be your child, your parent or your pastor? What’s it like to be a Republican or a Democrat? What’s it like to be Lebanese or Israeli? What’s it like to be Hispanic or Russian, to be 14 or 84, to be a mother with no food in the house or a widow whose husband of 50 years just died? What’s it like to be your neighbor or your enemy?

When I was in junior high school in Mississippi, a friend who was black told me that he didn’t like it when our school band played Dixie. I remember thinking, “I thought everyone loved Dixie.” He had to explain the good reasons he had for not liking Dixie. I had to think about whether I should like Dixie.

Counselors often encourage married couples to argue from the other side. When it’s done honestly, they understand in new ways.

Don’t you enjoy it when judges sentence slum lords to spend a month in their own apartment buildings? They must learn something.

It seems likely that if our parents had been Muslims we would have different ideas. Some of what we claim to believe now wouldn’t make as much sense.

It’s when we see from the other side that we learn. If we could trade places for just a day, imagine what we might discover—students and teachers, 70-year-olds and 7-year-olds, thin people and the more normally proportioned, married and single, parents and adults without children, natives and immigrants, church people and those who would rather be anywhere else, those who have been abused and those who have abused.

When we put ourselves in another’s place, we lose our sense of superiority and begin to feel compassion. It’s when your daughter says that she’s getting a divorce that you learn not to make sweeping judgments. You start to see more clearly. It’s when your best friend gets laid off that you stop seeing the unemployed as a statistic. You start to see faces instead of numbers. It’s when your brother admits that he’s an alcoholic that you stop calling alcoholics weak. You start to love.

Carlyle Marney said, “No drowning people are ever rescued from the dock.” No one is helped by people who sit in the same chair all of their lives. Sitting in someone else’s chair isn’t easy. We may sit in a chair in a hospital holding an arthritic hand. We may sit in a chair at a kitchen table sharing a cup of sorrow. We may sit in front of a computer praying that God will help us love people we’ve never seen clearly enough to love.

Brett Younger is pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth and the author of Who Moved My Pulpit? A Hilarious Look at Ministerial Life, available from Smyth & Helwys (800) 747-3016. You can e-mail him at byounger@broadwaybc.org.