Janie Beyer

As I read this commencement speech I quickly noticed a common theme. It’s not about you. There’s a bigger picture in this world. David talked about finding a new way of thinking that involved shutting down your own personal thoughts and beginning to think about others. This idea hit me hard due to the fact that my beliefs go hand in hand with this concept. In my eyes God created us for a purpose and one of the reasons is for us to love on people no matter who they are. But if we stay connected to our own sinful nature, or as David put it our natural default setting, we fail to see the people in our paths as worthy. We continue on rushing to get our own deeds done so we can go home and rest after a long day. But as we are busy with our own lives we could miss an opportunity to help someone out who really needs it. We focus too much on how awful we think our lives are that we fail to see how thankful we should be.

Our minds are consistently turned “on” in a constant fast pace of ideas and thoughts. Majority of the time those thoughts revolve around ourselves. We focus on what we need and how to help ourselves achieve our goals. Although it’s hard, I agree with David in the sense that we should begin to start switching our brains into another mode. We have got to open our eyes and notice how broken this world is. Our society is rotting in a hate filled world. People are too self absorbed to help out anyone else. So instead of coming together as a community to build each other up, we live on our own and watch ourselves crumble under the pressures of the world instead of asking for help. So many people have this false hope that they can do everything by themselves. Because our minds are always so self centered we never even bother to think that we can’t do something alone. So we fight and fight until we succeed or we miserably fail and wonder why. When in reality if we had stepped outside our pride we could’ve achieved our goal much faster. But nobody wants to get out of our bubbles so we all just stay away.

Everybody has something going on. It could be small or big and we would never know unless they told us. So what gives us the right to relinquish our anger that we’ve built up from selfish thoughts on someone who could be dealing with something way outside our own experiences? The minute we start thinking about someone else and their needs is the time our world gets a little bit sweeter. If we would all take the time to wake up and look around then maybe this world wouldn’t be so miserable.