Peak through a portal into someone else’s life.

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and walk a mile as a soldier in Iraq.
Suffer as swirling dust disturbed by the chaos of brutality chokes your lungs.
Say goodbye to the voices of your children at home, because the ringing cacophony of bombs is holding your ears hostage.
Put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Peer through the looking glass, and be the girl hooked up to machines, getting procedures done she can’t even pronounce.
Forget hiding under the bed, because there’s no safe-haven when your own body is the sole thing harming you.
Wait for the little green monster to remind you of your bare-skinned head, each time the nurse with the silky brown hair brings the sickening medications.
Peer through the looking glass.

Look out from behind someone else’s glasses, and see how blurry the world can be through the watering eyes of an indigent mother.
Find a way to tell your “prides and joys” there won’t be anything waiting under the tree this year.
Scrounge up scraps for your children to eat from day-to-day, while your own guilt is eating you up inside.
Look out from behind someone else’s glasses.

Beat through a different heart, and feel it pulse faster and faster as you morph into the Israeli grandmother crouching in trepidation in the rickety bomb shelter.
Taste the salty drops of water rolling down your face, as you rock back-and forth in fear of the unknown to come.
Feel the heat from the fiery buildings incinerate into your mind and ignite the memories of a peaceful existence into clouds of smoke and scattered ashes.
Beat through a different heart.

Walk a day in the life, and travel miles from home as a Sudanese refugee, because you are now a helpless victim of a genocide no one believes in.
Play the photo reels of those that will no longer be seen over and over in your head that won’t seem to stop spinning.
Pull up a seat and become witness to the horror film taking place in your backyard, and keep your fingers crossed that you won’t be cast a role.
Walk a day in the life.

Peak through a portal into someone else’s life.