Summary: Some time ago, a wise person told me to be careful how you treat people because you never know the things that they are going through. This advice has stuck with me throughout my years, and I've done my best to live into them daily. All people, regardless of race, class, or situation, deserve to be treated as children of God and nothing less. If we are not extremely careful, before we get to hear a person's story, we can categorize and ostracize people that are different from us. It is, admittedly, easy to write someone off as bad or crazy or not with it. It's easy to say that they don't care, which makes it easy for us not to care about them. That being said, I believe very strongly that, at the core, human beings are good. That ultimately we want what's best for ourselves and others. Somewhere along the line, however, we are conditioned to act otherwise. At some point we learn to take care of ourselves instead of community, we learn to ignore the needs of others, and we learn to separate ourselves from what God expects of us. In today's Gospel Jesus models and gives us a refresher course on our responsibilities towards people that are in need. We are told in scripture that Jesus has barely set foot on shore and a man possessed with demons greets him. This man is described as a man that "for long time has worn no clothes, and that he did not live in the house but in the tombs."
