The Importance of Every Encounter

In case you haven't heard of the app called Timehop, It's a nifty little app that looks back at your history on connected social mediums (FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram...) and every day it shows you your posts from that day in history. For me it's usually pictures of my kids, tales about sporting events, or something to do with Rivkah. Nothing that's ever really made me stop and think.

Today, my brother Matty posted this picture:

At a glance, this is just a reminder that a year ago he was in Israel for the first time and experiencing what the country had to offer. However, if you know Matty, you know that this is the night he met his now-wife Zoe, in a chance encounter.

When I saw this post I couldn't help but think about how often we meet new people, or even interact with people we are familiar with, and just have no clue what kind of impact we will have on the other person. If we could each look a year ahead at our Timehops and see what has happened in the year to come, how might we approach our everyday interactions with other people? Will the passenger I cut in front of to get onto a bus end up being a coworker some day? In Matty's case, will the person he had a chance encounter with in a bar thousands of miles away from home end up being his wife? What if he'd said something that wasn't so nice? How different could his year and his life have been?

Matty was given a rare blessing to be reminded a year later of a chance encounter from the past. Hopefully it can remind all of us to think twice when we talk to others and to think about what your actions now might effect down the line.