People feel comfortable when they know the person trying to teach them has had similar life experience. I look like an affluent dude in nice clothes. Poor people don’t trust me until I tell them I grew up with fleas in my bed, lived in low income housing, and ate discarded food.
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Sometimes sharing that experience is crucial to a person opening up and sharing. I think of this truth whenever I experience hardship, and I ask myself: “Whom can I better reach now that I’ve learned this? What person is God preparing me to help with this challenge?”
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Side note: I grew up with cockroaches in the bedding, crawling on me while I slept. The fleas were later in young adulthood when I became even poorer.
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But people in low income brackets don’t trust nicely-dressed dudes to tell them how to live. They grew up watching friends die, listening to gunshots and screams. So did I. We couldn’t play in the elementary school sandbox because of all the buried needles and used condoms.
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The point is that we can rise above what we’ve faced and use that very hardship to teach others who could not be reached otherwise. Painful things happen to us and become stories, and they leave scars. But we don’t truly heal until those scars become lessons we can give others.
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Whatever you’ve faced, scour the experience for lessons to learn. What would you take from this to teach someone else? To teach your own child someday? Then reach out and find someone who needs to hear that lesson.
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You have a chance to reach someone no one else can reach. Don’t succumb to your painful past. Use it to create hope.
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