The “Other Fellows” In Me

My life has no fixed geographical boundaries—it sometimes goes south and sometimes north; sometimes west and sometimes east.  It is like a world still in the making and subject to unexpected cataclysms and upheavals.  There are moments when I become other than what I usually am. My moods swing from here to there, my emotions run hot and cold, and these dreary seasons of mind and soul bring clouds and  rain and drenching spiritual weather.   I’m sure this happens only with me and never with you!  Someone once said that he was really a decent, kindly and likable person, only there is another fellow with a nature quite unlike my own, who “will come at times and sit in my clothes; uses my name, and gets mistaken for me.”  Sometimes this “other fellow” ruins my day with his complaints, his anger, his depressing spirit.  This “other fellow” disrupts my usual calm and reasoned existence.  And this “other fellow” is not just one.  Oh, no!  There is not just one “other fellow” but many!  I am a divided person with “many selves.”  If Jesus would ask me, “What is your name?”  I would have to answer with the demoniac and reply, “Legion” (Luke 8:30, NEB).

Try as I might, I can’t get rid of these “other fellows,” so different from who I think I am, or should be, or am meant to be.  I have to accept them, love them, and bring them together.  That is the only way I can become the real Me.  This is a life-long work, but a necessary one.  It is a work that must be done in order to become whole, for “a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.”

Arches National Park

From whence shall my help come?  I find help when I imagine Jesus walking along some dusty road in Galilee and seeing a village on a hillside.  Jesus knows there are many different kinds of people who inhabit a village.  Some are nasty, some kind, some religious, some irreligious, some moral, some immoral, but Jesus lumps them all together by saying, God’s sunshine does not skip a single person in that village.  What Jesus seems to be saying is that God loves every person in the village and his love is showered on each and every one of them.  No one is cast out  or robbed of the light of the sun.  I am a village, so many “other fellows” dwell there, and I must let God’s sunshine reach them until we can all walk together as one in the light given by that Love at the heart of all things.