How big is your DVD rack?

So last night I sat down and started to watch a DVD with my girlfriend, for all those interested it was Juno, which brought a series of thoughts to me as well. However the first thought that stood out to me was when I looked at our slightly oversized DVD stack.

As I looked at a pile of DVDs that were about three foot tall and three stacks wide I realised something. Firstly my family own a lot of DVDs, secondly when we watch a DVD it only takes the first watch for it to almost stick in your mind and finally that all those DVDs were peoples stories. Some of them stories may be real, most made up but that doesn’t matter. I wondered to myself how long it would take me to watch all of those DVDs. It would take days if not weeks, amongst the sore eyes that I would receive, I would also experience laughter, tears, joy and probably more emotional feelings than a human should experience all at once.

We as humans go to the cinema and pay money to go see people’s stories, like in Juno we watch how she gets pregnant and then eventually realises she’s in love. Let me ask you this, would someone pay to see your story? I know that so many people I know have ordeals that they struggle to cope with, days that never seem to end, and unless you’ve rescued a trapped family from a car wreck, no one really wants to know. What about all those times you’ve made someone feel so welcome when they walk into your church? What happens if your story is better told by someone else? Sometimes we don’t realise how much we affect others. Let’s face it, the best advantage of a DVD is that it beings a series of peoples thought and actions into one video. We however can only see with two eyes, we can’t hear others think, we may look at a pregnant teenager and laugh or say “oh my word”. And that’s before we ever know what happened or how they feel.

I guess my thought this week is we should all make an effort to listen to others stories, there free, they may cost you a cup of coffee, but I guarantee you that the person telling you there story will walk away feeling special, that someone actually cares about what they did, about how they helped someone or someone helped them. These stories may not be the ones that you pass around the world; however they are ones that will stick in your mind for a long time.
Secondly, how big is your DVD rack? Just like every DVD rack there will be stories you don’t want to watch again, but so many that you do. Don’t throw your DVDs away in the corner and forget about them. You never know some of those stories might help others in life.