One year at boarding school, I had a pair of dorm parents who'd never been parents before. What was typically learned with your first child, they had to learn with 19 teenage girls. And teenage girls aren't the most patient of teachers. It didn't always go so well.

One evening, as I walked into a crowded living room, a girl shouted out that she liked my earrings. I smiled and thanked her. Then another girl said she liked my shirt. I smiled and did a "bring it on" hand motion, encouraging other positive comments. I basked in the circle of compliments until I felt satiated, then I ceded the floor to another girl and we started to compliment her.

Those dorm parents saw this, and they were concerned.

I'm not sure how much later it was, but on another day, I was cleaning out my closet. My parents had sent up a jar of mayonnaise so I could make some tuna fish, and as I reached into my closet I knocked the jar over and it shattered on the concrete floor. Glass and mayonnaise splattered on me and the room and I bent down to clean it up. As I dropped a large piece of glass into the trash, the dorm mother came into my room to tell me they needed to talk with me.

"Can it wait?" I asked, looking at the mess on the floor.

"Now." was the quiet but adamant response.

I held up my mayonnaise-covered hands and followed her down the hall and into their sitting room. I sat on the couch across from them both, careful not to smear any mayonnaise on it.

For the next twenty minutes he told me how concerned he was for me because I had put myself up on a pedestal. He said that to keep me from getting hurt later, it was his job to knock me off it now. As he spoke, I remember staring at the globs of mayonnaise stuck in my long fingernails, fighting not to show any emotion.

Maybe he never saw the mayonnaise. Maybe she didn't notice the broken glass on the floor that I wanted to clean up before anyone stepped on it. Maybe they really were afraid that I was too full of myself and they thought they were being kind to me. Maybe some day I won't fight tears when I tell this story.

I don't know.

What do I know?

• I know that God uses pain to shape us.
• I know that our pain can help us notice, love, and help others who are in pain.
• I know that it is never our job to knock others off their pedestals. Instead, we should be building platforms and pointing out the stairs.
• I know that everyone has a story, and that when we jump to our first impressions, we're probably missing a lot of the little details. We need to take the time to discover their story. We need to give them a voice.

I also know that we need to be in this life together.

I voted on the way home today, and I really hope my candidate wins. But whoever wins, and whoever loses, lets work together to make our world just a little bit better tomorrow than it was today.