The 4 People You’ll Meet

Any given day you are around any number of people. It may be at work, it may be at school, it may be at the park, it may be at the gym, or it may be in the checkout line at your local Wal-Mart – but you are likely around a lot of people. It could be dozens or it could be hundreds. But regardless of how many people you are around on a daily basis, whether it’s a lot or a little, every single one of them is one of four different types of people.

One type of person is just hard hearted. It doesn’t matter how much sense something makes, how true it is, or how positively it could impact their lives, they just aren’t going to listen to reason. They’ve got their mind made up, life is figured out, and there’s nothing that you could tell them that’s going to make any difference whatsoever. Truth is lost on such people because of their own stubborn will.

Another type of person is shallow. As with most things that are shallow this type of person may appear to have some substance, some depth to them. But it doesn’t take very long until you learn there’s just not that much below the surface. So you can talk to them, perhaps momentarily assume you’re making some progress, but you’ll find out pretty quickly that what you’re saying just isn’t resonating with them at any productive level. You might think truth is having an effect on such people, but you’ll soon learn otherwise.

A third type of person carries a lot of baggage. In fact, they carry so much baggage that it has a strangle hold on them. So you talk to them, you find they have some depth to them, you think you might be able to reach them on an eternal level, but at some point something you say, some tidbit of truth is considered to be just too disruptive to their life as they know it. It’s then that those cares and concerns of life overshadow reality and they yield to their pride, opinion, preference, or the pressure they feel from others. This person may go along with truth until it conflicts with something or someone in their life, then it is practically lost on them for fear of what it could cost.

The last type of person is open and receptive. They have life in perspective and understand the fact that truth isn’t whatever we each make it to be. They accept that regardless of age, education, or experience that we are always in a position to learn something that perhaps we’ve never known before or perhaps have misunderstood in the past. They are always willing to listen and reason concerning things that are right and wrong and if necessary reevaluate what their belief system is on a particular matter. Unlike the others, this person doesn’t fear truth. They crave it and what it can do in their lives.

In His parable of the soils (Matthew 13) Jesus told His disciples that every person they met would be one of these four people. They’d be the wayside soil (hardhearted), the rocky soil (shallow), the thorny soil (carrying baggage), or the good soil (open and receptive). And the hard reality is anybody we know, anybody we meet could be any one of them at any given time. There’s fear in the unknown. But like the sower we have to go forward and sow. We’ll face rejection. In fact, we’ll face it more often than we face success. But somewhere out among the billions and billions of people in the world each of those four people are represented. So we sow among the hardhearted, the shallow, and the burdened because every so often we’ll meet that fourth person, the open, honest, and receptive soul who really wants to know what’s right.   And it will be that one soul among the four we meet that will make everything we do worthwhile.

-Andy