But Men and Women Aren't Statistics!

There is sometimes a tendency to look upon the problems of other people as statistical rather than personal. Unless we guard ourselves against it, we are inclined to think of men in numbers and in groups rather than each as a personal and important person. As the news is announced, we hear of a hundred made homeless by flood or fire in some far place, or of a thousand trapped or in trouble in a distant battle. We read of one or two or a score or more of casualties in a crash. We read of deaths from certain diseases. And unless we guard against it, we may not sense the deeply personal side – the living, breathing human beings, each with his rights, his hopes, his personal pursuits, his family, his friends, and his 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 of whom we read and hear, are other peoples’ fathers, mothers, families, friends, and all are children of that God in whose image men were made, each with eternal possibilities, each an individual person with his individual problems, even though we sometimes find it convenient to reduce them to mere mathematics. The casualties of war, or a million starving children, or ten thousand traffic deaths by ten thousand reckless drivers aren’t just figures – they are people who love and are loved by other people – each on a child of that God who is the Father of us all. Repeatedly we need to remind ourselves to be less impersonal about people.