How would you feel if a law was passed that required us all to carry transparent luggage, purses, man bags, and wallets? Would it affect what you carried and how you carried it?
I recall when Vickie and I, with one of our daughters and one of her friends, went through customs on a certain island on vacation. The customs inspectors opened our luggage and did what I considered an unnecessary inspection of women’s undergarments. The two girls were in high school, and Vickie and I were well into middle age, and I was embarrassed for my wife and the girls. However, it was better to say nothing than to spend my time in interrogation, so we moved on to what became a delightful visit. In retrospect, upon our return to the States I should have sent the customs inspectors a lingerie catalog.
Last year our school district began requiring all backpacks to be transparent; I was reminded of this recently when I chatted with one of our neighbors who is in elementary school. I was glad to see he was carrying a dictionary. My desks have never been tidy, nor have my satchels or briefcases, so I can only imagine what a backpack would be like. There is a reason Vickie packs for our trips.
While we complain about the intrusiveness of Google, Apple, Amazon and the like, I wonder if we aren’t hooked on this drug ourselves. Don’t we manifest an insatiable desire to know details about people that really should be no one’s business in a sane society? What does this say about our own lives, about the substance or lack thereof in them?
We make celebrities out of men and women and young people who expose themselves, literally and figuratively, and we think it is great fun – and I suppose we see this as much in the professing church with its celebrity culture as in the world.
People no longer represent the image of God to us, they no longer are accorded sacred space; could Cole Porter have envisioned such an “Anything Goes” society?
And this brings me to wallets, mail, and the internet. (Of course dear reader, you undoubtedly knew that this is just where we were going.)
I recently found a man’s wallet in the parking lot of a shopping center. It took a moment or two to register that it was a wallet, after all, you don’t expect to find wallets lying about a parking lot. It isn’t unusual, though it is disgusting, to see dental floss, but you don’t expect to see wallets.
After picking the wallet up, I opened it and saw that there was a wad of cash, closed it again, and pondered what to do. The only other thing I saw in the wallet was a driver’s license from South Carolina, this was through a plastic window compartment in the center. I did not look at the details of the license.
I had three choices, I could take it into the store where the man had probably been shopping, I could open the wallet again and try to contact the owner with the information inside, or I could take it to the police department. It seemed to me that the police department was the best option, so after picking up a few things in the store I drove to the police station.
I said to the lady at the station’s front desk, “Someone is having a miserable day right now. Let’s make it better.”
She replied with a smile, “We can do it. We’re pretty good at finding people.”
Within about 30 minutes I received a call from a deeply grateful man.
Now here is the point I want to make, when I opened that wallet I felt like I was invading someone’s personal and sacred space. I did not read the driver’s license; I didn’t look through whatever shopping or credit or medical cards may have been in the wallet. I didn’t see how much cash was in the wallet – for all I knew it could have been all one-hundred-dollar bills or all one-dollar bills. I simply wanted to verify what I had found.
The same principle (and feeling) applies when I collect neighbors’ mail when they are away. Our local post office is not known for its efficiency, and so many of us ask a neighbor to collect our mail when we are away, rather than ask the post office to hold it until we return. I do not shuffle through the mail as I retrieve it from my neighbor’s mailbox, I put it in a stack, go back to our house, and deposit it in a bag or box to await our neighbor’s return.
Now let me share with you what has me thinking about this subject of honoring sacred individual space. It may make sense to you, it may not.
Over the past few weeks I’ve received some very encouraging emails from a reader of one of my blog threads. They are some of the most thoughtful notes anyone has ever sent me, they are much more than, “Nice job!” They explore the dynamics of both content and style and they encourage me to work a bit harder and more thoughtfully at what I do, to be a better steward of God’s grace.
I have never met this person, I have never spoken to this person, I don’t know whether this person is a man or woman because the name could be either. I only know this person through his or her thoughtful writing, through the person’s “voice” and content. The only thing I know about the person is that the person is associated with someone who I do know a little about, but that is all I know.
This morning, as I was pondering this correspondent’s most recent note to me, I was curious to know more about him or her. So I thought, “I’ll do a Google search and see what I find.” And then…and then…it just didn’t feel right.
Better to honor our conversation, better to respect where our relationship is, wiser to acknowledge the sacred trust that is inherent in our interactions with others, than to invade the space of others, than to consume information about others, than to treat others as objects of curiosity.
Does this make any sense to you?
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