Tonight John and I were watching the national news. There was a report about a plane who had to make an emergency landing. As the pilot communicated to the air traffic controller he said, “We are declaring an emergency . . . 106 souls on board.”
As I heard these words I remembered watching another news report fairly recently, and they used the phrase “souls on board”.
I remember thinking how odd those words sounded coming from a news report and yet so very beautiful.
We don’t usually hear the word soul used unless we are talking about religion or God or death. But I thought it was beautiful that the pilots recognized what C.S. Lewis famously explained,
“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”
I have tried before to go throughout my day viewing every person I come in contact with as a soul. I walked in the grocery store and instead of seeing a bunch of bodies walking around I saw transparency – souls who were transparent. They were a lot deeper. There was a lot more to them. They had a past and hurts. They had hope and a future.
Seeing souls showed me their worth.
Times when I have imagined bodies in this way, I feel more patient, more empathatic, more loving. I’m not in a hurry to get my way or be first in line. For a second, I have a tiny, very tiny, glimpse of how God sees them and how God sees all of the souls on board that He loves so dearly.
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