This time I’ll go a bit more religious than I have previously. I’m a Christian, as you may know/have figured out. So today I’ll present another way of looking at things from a Christian perspective. this is NOT to say that this is the view of most, or even many, Christians.

Let’s start out with how I think most people view others right now. Most of us think of each person as a completely independent individual, with possible exceptions of some sort of tie to immediate family. There is, however, another fairly interesting way to look at it, one that I think may be closer to how God sees it.

That view consists of looking at all humanity as something like a tree. It all started with Adam and Eve, and spread out from there. Each person is an individual branch on the tree… but it’s all one interconnected living thing. That helps explain why we need other people so much… what happens to the branch of a tree if you cut it off of the tree?

There are all kinds of interesting ideas that can come from this view. It makes all of us connected, every single person. It even makes us “more” connected to people to whom we were already connected, like grandparents. It’s one thing to look at them as individuals who happened to have a child who happened to have you. It’s quite another to actually look at them as being part of the same living being as you, and a pretty close part, at that.

It also makes it easy to see how hurting anyone causes hurt back to you. After all, if you cut your finger, it affects your whole body. If you cut your wrist badly enough, your whole body can die. Now you may be tough and be able to deal with pain, even a great deal of pain, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t inflicted, or that it isn’t doing any harm.

Another thing it can make it easier to see is how people who are seemingly unrelated to each other (in the independent view) can still make a huge impact on each other. You could yell at your child, who then is unpleasant in school, which makes the teacher cranky, who then yells at their spouse, who then gets drunk and goes out and gets in a wreck. That’s not to say that you’re legally responsible, or even that you bear the blame morally, as all the people involved made choices, but your one choice (good or bad) traveled through the “branches” of the human organism and affected someone severely who you don’t even know and will likely never meet.

And this happens more often than you think. Your choice to smile at someone (a real smile, just for them) can brighten someone’s day, which can affect other people, and be generally uplifting to a whole place. Being good to someone can even do something as drastic as making them choose not to commit suicide, thereby extending their branch and causing unimaginable changes to the lives of all they touch. Being bad to someone can have equally far reaching consequences.

So, in light of the human organism, be aware not just of how your choices affect you, but how they affect those around you, and how that can affect those around them, and how that can affect those around them, and how that can affect those around them…