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God's Plan for his Making People (as I see it)
                    Sandy Dickson

I love meeting wonderful people, and they are everywhere—all over the world. You can go anywhere and meet them. Well, depending on what part of town you might venture into, because there are some parts where most all the people you might meet would be rather precarious. But I’m just talking about the nice ones here.

You can travel to the most distant parts of the globe and people will drop whatever they’re doing to make sure you get the guidance to the directions you asked them for. They will walk you half a block to make sure they can show you where to turn and tell you how far you must go. Even if they don’t speak your language, they will find a way to communicate what you need to know.

People will take you into their homes, prepare you meals, give you a place to sleep, give you rides, take you to restaurants, and often even insist on picking up the tab. You want to know them forever. You exchange addresses, take pictures, write to them or at least exchange Christmas cards. You know you would be great friends if you lived in the same locale.

That’s the sad part about traveling. You meet such wonderful people that you know, chances are, you will never see again. So you have to just be glad for the time you could each share and figure them as a bonus to your life; your trip, rather than that you can’t know them throughout your life.

Then I think about how God had to do it that way, really. He couldn’t just put all the nice people in one place. Then no one else would have any. He put wonderful people around everywhere in the globe for other nice people to meet so they could be there for each other and everybody would have some.

I volunteer at a hospital where people come from all over the country to be treated for cancer. Some arrive with family members, others alone and many are outpatients. Since they come on a regular schedule for their treatment, sometimes the same person will have family members one time and no one along the next. They need friends, comfort, company and just plain nice people for the camaraderie. Everyone who works at this hospital is marvelously nice, and that’s one thing they look for when hiring employees. Visitors notice and always comment on how nice everyone is.

I love taking people around, being there for them when they need me and being their friend. I will be their best friend while they are there, we will be active in each other’s lives and I can a serve a purpose for them while they’re there. It seems to be a very important purpose for them too. I take them shopping, take them to my home, and around to see their surroundings. I’m so glad I can be a person to serve them in their time of need. I just hate that I can’t always see them and be in the same touch a good friend would be throughout their lives on a permanent basis, but I often try. Then the years go by and the contact wanes. But I can take comfort in knowing that I was there for them when they needed me. Some friendships are for a specific need and time in a life, others are for many years and some are for a lifetime.

God also makes people that aren’t so nice. I’m not so sure He planned it that way, but it’s a matter of their choice and He did plan free will, so everyone can choose how to be.  Therefore, while there are always enough nice people to go around for everyone in each locale, unfortunately there are enough bad ones too, which I personally believe can serve as bad examples. We can all find bad examples everywhere, which means, looking at the  bright side, even they have a purpose.

Then too, if there weren’t the bad examples, the good ones wouldn’t stand out so much. They would go more unnoticed and then we might come to expect everyone to jump to their feet and serve and there would be no contrast so we wouldn’t really notice or appreciate their altruism and kindness as fully.

The good Lord also gave some thought to ways of identification. Everyone has to look different. Isn’t that amazing? You can go to the most crowded place and still never see one face identical to another. A mall, an airport or any given crowd are all good examples, then you can sit and think about all the other same type places in the world and all the other faces on all the crowded streets and everywhere in the whole world with no two are alike—that we know of. It wouldn’t work well for God to use the same face in two different countries at the same time because God knew the world would become smaller and He would be found out. Eventually some traveler would see someone identical to someone else or even to themselves. Or one of them would immigrate to the same proximity where their identical look-alike lives and that would bust the whole plan. So people can only look similar, and if you had them side by side, you could still tell them apart, even if it was just by their spirit and demeanor. Even identical twins have enough subtile differences that those who know them well can’t be fooled.

If an artist were asked to draw or paint as many different faces from his imagination that he could conjure up, how many could be created from one mind without duplication of already existing faces in models or pictures? Twenty or thirty? One-hundred maybe? But not billions of them. That alone, to me, is proof (one of many) that God exists. Who else could do that?

Now whether or not God had decided to recycle faces throughout history is another matter. I’ve often wondered if that’s not why He opted to start giving people shorter life spans than the 700 and 800 years the characters in the Old Testament lived. I mean Noah was 600 years old when he started building the ark, and who knows how old his three sons were who helped him. When faces lived that long, maybe God was running out of patterns to use over again, so He decided to shorten the life spans so He could start recycling. Otherwise the designs that lasted that long could start looking like other faces. People would say, “Boy, that Methuselah really looks like Shem; Noah’s son.” Well, Methuselah could have been 650 at that point and Shem a mere 400 or 500 years-old. Do you see what I’m saying here? Methuselah lived to be 969 years old and didn’t even have the son the Bible speaks of until age 187, and then in another 782 had some more kids! God was probably saying, “Oh, no, I can’t start using the same faces until someone dies, so I better start shortening their lives. If I make them live to only 80 or 90 years, I can reuse the design in 30 years or so and no one will know the difference. Of course I know I can’t reuse the real famous ones with high visibility because they are immortalized in photographs, artwork, postage stamps and currency everywhere. I can’t make too many Washingtons or Lincolns for sure, because people will catch on.”
    
So, summing it all up, I think God made nice people everywhere for everyone else, but if we meet them in different locales along the way, then never to see them again, that’s okay. It’s one of life’s bonuses. The bad people are the examples of how not to be and for the contrast of appreciating the good ones. The faces, well, they are for easy identification for us, backed up, of course, by fingerprints as a sort of insurance policy as a positive identification. And so the world goes on, we all look different and every hundred years or so, God might allow Himself to repeat a previously manufactured design. It’s recycling at its finest. At least that’s what I accept as possibility.

Copyright © 2007 Sandy Dickson. All rights reserved.