When we’re going through something tough, it becomes so difficult to look beyond it to other things and people. Everything becomes related to our situation and consequently blocked out. This is not good. And so I am feeling the need to look beyond myself and allow others to have the full understanding and compassion they rightly deserve.

I’ve just finished reading A Tale of Two Cities, one of my favourite books of all time. As I read it, I noticed again that the thing that makes Madame Defarge so monstrous is that she is entirely shut into her own suffering and shows no mercy to anyone outside of it. Do you ever catch yourself being like that too?

I don’t deny that most, if not all, of us are bent down with hardship. But I wonder if you can find the strength to look above it and see something, someone else who deserves your attention. In Dickens’s book, the unlikely hero, Sydney Carton, pulls himself out of his drunken behaviour to give up his very life for someone else. After his decision is made, he changes for the better, helping the person nearest him, the little seamstress, right up until the end. In a thankfully smaller way, you can see how helping someone else can lift you up too.

So, I will try and do that for someone today if you try too. When we look up or around ourselves we begin to focus less on our own difficulties and more on things and people around us.

A few days ago I was surprised by a flock of tiny birds I didn’t recognise when I looked out my window. Apparently another person in a different place going through a horrible time saw them too. Maybe they were recognisable to a more trained eye, but I like to think they were little reminders that when we look up, small wonders may bless us.

My son discovered a word recently, ‘sonder’. It means ‘The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own.’ Remember that, next time you feel alone in your trouble. More importantly, remember the Son of God has been there too, and is still with You now.