What’s Going On Inside

What’s Going on Inside

I live in a city neighborhood that can be noisy. Sometimes, mostly at night, I hear music booming from the speakers of a passing car and think, Good grief—what must that sound like to someone inside that car?

I consider this about passing traffic, yet I hardly ever think about what it might be like to be inside someone else’s skin. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it,” says wise Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.^a

What’s going on with the colleague whose husband I know lost his job—who has two kids and a mortgage and no easy way to make ends meet? What’s going on inside the heart of the boy who carries the Diet Dr Pepper to my car in the drive-through, the one who greets me with a gold-toothed smile and likes to say, “See you next time”? What’s it like to be him? What’s going on inside?

I don’t ponder this much, but I believe Jesus did. I believe he studied the centurion whose son was on his deathbed and felt the dry-mouthed fear of every father’s worst nightmare. I believe he crawled inside the skin of a Samaritan woman at high noon and felt how it was to be shunned by the neighbors but dying for love. I believe he inhabited the heart of Peter each time Peter blurted the words, “I know him not!” and imagined what every traitor longs for most: the trust of the betrayed, undeserved but sure.

How many people do I pass in a day whose stories could use an infusion of hope? How many times do I ache for someone to pause long enough to ask me, “What’s going on inside?” I don’t know how it is in someone else’s world unless I ask. Not any more than I know what’s going on behind the lighted windows of my street or the car in the next lane.

Don’t you ever wonder what’s going on inside?

Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.

Jeremiah 29:7, NASB

^a Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1960), 30.