Sonder: Loving the Least the Way God Does
This is the most recent teaching Sam Dunn gave me, dated just this month. It opens with a word I didn't expect to find in a Bible study: sonder. It comes from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and it names the realization that every stranger you pass is living a life as vivid and complicated as your own — each of us at once a hero, a supporting cast member, and an extra in a thousand overlapping stories. In your story you're the main character. To the person beside you, you're an extra. Sam takes that and turns it toward God: according to God, no one is more important than you in the life that you live — and the same is true of every single person He sends across your path.
## How We Actually Show God We Love Him
Sam asks the question plainly: how do we physically show God that we love Him? And Jesus answers it just as plainly: "Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, you did it to Me" (Matthew 25:40).
Then Sam defines a word most of us read past. The least. He says the "least" refers to the amount of dignity a person has — and there is no dignity outside of knowing Christ. So the people Jesus is talking about are the least likely to serve Him. And here's the part that wrecks our assumptions: that could be anyone. Rich or poor. Mean or good-looking. The depressed, the everyday people on the street with no inclination to serve God at all. Those are the least. Not a category of unfortunate people somewhere else — the actual faces you pass without a second look.
This is the heartbeat of why we do prison ministry and street outreach. The man behind the wall and the woman at the corner are not background extras in God's story. In the life each of them is living, they are the main character — and Jesus said how you treat them is how you treat Him.
## What Real Worship Looks Like
Sam reaches for Isaiah 58, where God redefines fasting for people who thought they already had it figured out: "Is this not the fast that I have chosen — to loose the bonds of wickedness?" (Isaiah 58:6). True devotion, God says, isn't private religious performance; it's setting people free. And the promise attached, in verse 13, is that He will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father. So Sam offers a prayer worth praying every morning: Holy Spirit, send someone my way that I may be a light to help lead them closer to accepting Christ.
## Check the Attitude at the Door
But Sam knows what sinks this kind of mission — our attitude toward the people we're sent to. So he comes back, one more time, to his recurring theme: "Judge not, that you be not judged" (Matthew 7:1). He reminds us that Moses lost the Promised Land because he got angry at how the people were acting and let the world affect how he served God (Deuteronomy 32:51). And then he gives the line I want tattooed on the door of every outreach we run:
*As long as God hasn't given up on someone, we don't have the right to give up on them. We need to make sure our attitude doesn't get in the way of our testimony.*
His prayer over all of it comes from Colossians 1:9–10 — that we'd be filled with the knowledge of His will and spiritual understanding, so that we can walk worthy of the Lord. Sonder, in the end, is just learning to see people the way God already sees them: each one a whole world, none of them an extra.
**If you've ever felt like an extra in your own life — overlooked, written off, one of "the least" —** hear this clearly: to God, you are the main character He has not given up on. Reach out. We'd be honored to pray with you.
