Can We Really be That Different Inside?

As I was reading a story a passage stood out that made me go over it again more slowly. As I was reading it I glanced over at grandpa and for but a moment I saw him as being an entirely different man.

'Faith, lost in her thoughts, traveled back to the night of the hanging she witnessed. She remembered the man sitting on a bare back horse, a noose around his neck. When asked if he had any last words the man looked straight into his hangman's face and said, "I feel no repentance for my act against you in my heart, only pity do I offer you."

Without a word but with anger in his heart the man stepped back from the horse and lashed his flank with a vicious swing. Startled, the horse jumped, fled and left behind the man on his back. The man dropped like a ton of bricks and his neck broke instantly.

The girl whispered only one word, "Why?"

Hearing her, her owner had raised a hand to punish her. She instantly pulled her head into her shoulder, closed her eyes, and clenched her teeth to await the slap she knew was coming to her.
When the blow did not come she risked looking up.

She saw the cane of the old man, who was standing by her side, in the crook of her owner's raised arm. His hair was a snowy white. His face wrinkled with age. His back bent from a lifetime of hard work. His knees were bent from having to carry more weight than they should anymore.

But his eyes still burned with the fire of a younger man as he said to her owner, "No, her question is one worthy of an answer. A question everyone in this crowd should be asking."
Then, turning to her, his cane still in the crook of the arm and seemingly ignoring the man he had these words to say, "The man was hung for but one reason. He was hung for obediently abiding in the words of his Father. His only crime was honoring his Father."

"If that is true" said my owner, "then the hanging was an act of murder by the crowd."

"Yes, many would agree with you, my friend. For, you and others will only look upon the act of the mob and judge them. I did too until I heard the last words of the hanged man. Me, this old man prefers to see it as a man sacrificing his life to bring honor to the words of his Father."

Then he pulled the cane down and feebly began to walk away. He stopped. And these words he spoke to her. "Remember this night, little one, and the words you heard. For one day you will need them." Then looking at my owner he said, "Do nothing to erase these words or erase this night from her mind."

He then walked over to the hanged man, signaled to a wagon that was waiting nearby. When the wagon rolled to a stop under the body, the old man laboriously got into the bed, reached up, and cut the man down. Sitting in the bed, cradling the dead man in his arms, he nodded the driver to leave. She could hear him crying as they left.

The snort of the black brought her back out of her thoughts. The night she remembered. The night of a memory of a man and his son cradled in his lap. Two men had been witness to the same act but each had seen it differently.'

As I put the book down I could not help but wonder how often that be true. So many people viewing the same thing yet each will see something different. Are we all that different?