Human nature and diverse experiences

So yesterday I had three very different experiences that sort of sums up the different circles I run in around here. During the day I spent my time in a small village out near the mountain where the first King of Lesotho gathered together a disparate group of individuals and made them into the Basotho people of today offering them shelter and security in a time of great unrest in exchange for loyalty and fighting for him in battle when it was needed. The old men I was interviewing (with the help of a Mosotho friend as my Sesotho language skills wasn't quite good enough for full-length interviews) were both prophets in an African independent church that was formed in the 1920s and takes its name from the founder of the nation, Moshoeshoe. Both of them emphasized during the interview that they are not the ones controlling their message and that Moshoeshoe himself must have had a deeper understanding of religion (ie sent from a higher power) because while he invited missionaries of different denominations into his country (in the 19th century, a time when denominational differences between various Christian groups mattered a lot more than they seem to today in the West), he himself never joined any of the churches. He saw them as useful to his mission and for his people but stayed above them in order to try to preserve peace in his country.
Then in the late afternoon I found myself sweating on the hot streets of Maseru running hill repeats with a disparate group of Basotho ranging in age from late teens to well over 50 who all meet in the afternoons to do some training. It is mostly a junior development running group for aspiring national-class runners, but there are some serious trainers who happen to be older and slower as well. A fun group to train with and the hill repeats certainly burn the lungs and legs at 5500 feet! I try to meet up with them at least once a week to get in a good quality workout and a couple of them might even make it to the St. Louis marathon this year to race in the US.
Finally, I made it with two minutes to spare to a get-together in the backyard of some friends' who were hosting an inaugural-watching party for a group of 30-40, of whom probably 2/3rds were American. We watched the pageantry on the Mall unfold, the excited coming together for the peaceful transition of power and heard a speech that echoed some of the great figures and speeches from the American past.
Doing all these things on the same day may sound like a disparate day of acts not connected, but in all of them, the theme ran through that we are all human and need to treat each other as such and life not only can and will go on, but can improve for all people. All the people I came across were working not only to better themselves but had also come together with others to make life better for a wider circle of people. While I did not understand much of what the prophets of the independent church were saying (even when they were translated into English), some of what my running colleagues were saying in Sesotho or what all the people watching the speech in Washington, Maseru or anywhere else in the world were thinking, it made me reflect that the most powerful acts come from people coming together to understand each other and work for good.
While the news reports of conflicts and death in many places (and ignores others, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but that should be another post), only listening to/watching or reading the news can cause us to lose the human perspective--that everyday throughout the world, people are coming together to better understand each other and work for good. It isn't reported in the news, but it is what makes the world go on and gets me out of bed in the morning.
Stay well.