Today, like most days, I rode the metro. But today was a special day for me because my eyes saw things in a new light.

If you go one direction from Jen and I’s place you would end up in the more ‘middle-class’ French part of town. If you go the other direction you get to experience a whole different world from ‘normal Paris’…These places don’t make their way onto postcards. Not because they are bad, but because they aren’t the typical Paris scene of a fancy monument or some trendy looking person sipping on an espresso in a little cafe window. But I love these off the beatin’ path neighborhoods.

After riding the metro a few stops I noticed something…my pastyish white skin was the minority color compared to the beautiful chocolate, coffee, and creamy colors of skin that covered the souls of my traveling companions…I was looking around at the beautiful faces of the world on my metro and I was hit with a deep sense of being human, of solidarity in the cause of being alive. I won’t describe it well…but I distinctly felt my smallness in the scope of humanity…yet at the same time I realized how each one of us have a history and a story that uniquely matters to God…Africans, Asians, Arabs, Europeans…even the tourists that got on the metro at the Sacré Coeur stop…are unique and each one is looked over with love by our Maker. I distinctly felt the love God has for me, but even bigger, the love he has for the creation that He made in His image…I began to well up with emotion just seeing the beauty of people. I am so grateful to live in a place with such rich diversity.

Sure the metro got packed…and hot…and stinky…but all I could see was the beauty radiating from the faces of the people on the metro. I wish that my eyes could see this all the time in the city.