A Book and Its Cover

I recently attended my 25th high school class reunion. I was anxious about it but also excited. I wasn’t really a “popular” kid in high school. I wasn’t un-popular. I just had my friends and we did our thing, more of a bad girl than anything!

My husband encouraged me to talk to those that I wouldn’t normally talk to in high school or that I wasn’t friends with back then. So, I did! It was a really fun time -- took me back several years!

Fast forward two weeks and a few of us girls decided to meet for coffee. I suggested we invite a girl whom I wasn’t friends with in school. She did pom-poms and dated jocks; I smoked cigarettes and listened to Led Zeppelin!

We all began to share about our lives, and then we started talking about high school and the years after. She shared how un-perfect her life was back then, her struggles, her family issues, her own issues. How I had assumed wrong! I had looked at her and thought she had this perfect little life from a perfect little family. She shared that it had been anything but that. As I shared what my life was like during those years and the question was asked, “Sally, what happened, how did you change all of that?” I was able to tell them I had become a born-again Christian, which led her to tell me that she had recently become a Christian as well. I was encouraged and touched by her story.

That old adage “don’t judge a book by its cover” rang so true to me. Not only does time have a way of changing things, but so does Jesus. My reunion ended up being a reminder to not look at the outside of people’s lives, but to look through the junk and into the heart, just like Jesus does.

Sally Hall