But Men and Women Aren't Statistics!

In the many complexities of our way of life, there sometimes seems to be a tendency to look upon the problems of other people as statistical rather than personal. Unless we guard ourselves against it, we inclined to think of men in terms of numbers and groups rather than of each man as a personal and important individual. As the news of the day breaks upon us, we hear of a hundred made homeless by flood or by fire in some far place, or of a thousand trapped or in trouble on a distant battle front. We read of one or two or a score or more of casualties in a crash. We read of the statistics of deaths from certain diseases. And unless we guard against it, we may not see the deeply personal side behind these reports we may not see the living, breathing human beings, each with his family, his friends, his rights, his hopes, and his eternal future. Unless we guard against it, we may just see so many subtracted from the census. The fact is that the world isn’t just billions of people; an army isn’t just a million impersonal men; an epidemic isn’t just an academic problem; a nation isn’t merely two hundred million sales prospects; a city isn’t simply a hundred thousand votes; an accident isn’t merely a matter of mathematics. The people about whom we read reports are other peoples’ fathers, mothers, families, and friends, and are children of that God in whose image men were made, each with an immortal destiny and an eternal individuality, each an individual person with his individual problems, even though we sometimes find it convenient for various purposes to reduce them to mere mathematics. The casualties of battle, or a million starving children, or ten thousand traffic deaths from ten thousand reckless drivers aren’t just figures they are people who love and are loved by other people each one a child of that God who is the Father of us all. And repeatedly we need to remind ourselves to be less impersonal about people.