Smile when you say that

Yesterday morning I woke up in a bad mood. Bad isn't quite right. I woke up and everything felt wrong, off in some way or another. I felt like a petty, mean-spirited person living in a petty, mean-spirited world, and I dreaded having to go outside because I didn't know what kind of petty, mean-spirited people I was going to run into. Also, I had a slight runny nose.

[Author's note: All this whining has a point. Please bear with me.]

The only reason I left my house yesterday was because I agreed to go shopping with a friend. She wanted my help picking out a leather jacket. (The jacket was for the purpose of riding motorcycles. Only people without fashion sense ask me for fashion advice.) Also, her car isn't big enough for the dresser-thing she was buying. Had she asked me yesterday, I wouldn't have agreed to go. Such was my mood. But, fortunately for both of us, I already agreed to go on this outing days before.

[Another author's note: These next few paragraphs are the bit you were bearing with me for. Thanks for your patience.]

On the way to my friend's place, I stopped by a coffee shop, ordered my coffee, and stared menacingly at the wall while I waited for my coffee to be brewed. I'm fairly certain the wall didn't care. Coffee in hand, I was about to leave when I heard this:

"Hey, dude, can I see your shirt?"

So I turned and showed him my shirt. It's a vintage 1980-something Stryper shirt (they were a Christian metal band back in the day). I'm particularly fond of that shirt because it's actually old, not faked to look old. I know it's old for two reasons. (1) I was there when my brother bought it at a concert. (2) There really isn't a viable commercial market for falsified Stryper paraphernalia what with nobody knowing who they are.

The guy who asked, who was also getting his coffee, said, "Sweet. That shirt is awesome."

That was enough to break my bad mood. The world was no longer full of evil people bent on doing evil things in evil ways. The world was what it really is, a broken place full of broken people trying to do the best with what they have. That's a world I can live in.

I'm consistently struck by how small niceties can have large affects on the quality of people's days. Because lives are made of days, that impact ripples outward into the quality of their life. I know that seems a little weird. After all, the incident in question was just some guy complimenting my shirt. In the vast scheme of things, what does that matter? I'm arguing that it matters a lot. You see, lives are made of small things. We look back at life and say it was formed by these big moments, these big turning points. But is it? Isn't it really the thousands upon thousands of small things that make up a life? You can't skip the hard work of college just to get a diploma. And you can't skip the hard work of living well either. You don't get a diploma if you live well, you don't get to go to heaven if you live well (Christ paid that price, which is good, because none of us could pay it if he hadn't). What you get is this: you get to make the world a better place.

I knew a youth pastor once who always had a compliment for everyone. I know what you're thinking. A guy who compliments everyone might as well not compliment anyone at all. After all, what meaning could it have? But he didn't come off as disingenuous because his compliments were based on knowing you. He could find out what you did right, what took real effort on your part, and let you know that he thought that work had merit. He once said to me that his goal in life was to make the world a better place.

I think he's off to a good start.