community

The Year of Friendship & Hospitality

January 30, 2018 By Michelle 5 Comments

Last November my closest friend here in Lincoln moved to Connecticut. Even now, nearly three months later, the impact of Deidra’s move still reverberates. I feel a quiet pang when I spot a car that looks like hers pass by. I notice my stubborn avoidance of the street where she and Harry lived, my reluctance to revisit one of our favorite lunch spots.

I miss the favorite sweater kind of easiness and comfort of my in-person friendship with Deidra. When my husband and I wanted to invite someone over for dinner or drinks on the patio, Deidra and Harry were our go-to couple. Our friendship had grown to a place where we didn’t have to work so hard at it. They were like family, without the baggage.

Back when our kids were preschoolers, Brad and I hosted dinner parties and gatherings with lots of different friends at our house pretty regularly. Without family nearby, we didn’t have easy babysitting options, so we did the next best thing: we invited friends to hang out with us in our home.

We were part of a supper club with two other couples who also had young children. We invited Brad’s colleagues or mine over for summer barbeques and winter potlucks. We belonged to a small group with members of our church, and even when we weren’t meeting weekly as part of a Bible study, we got together with our group for fun. We socialized with other parents of young children – women I had met in a local Mom’s Club and their husbands and kids.

As the years passed and our kids got older, Brad and I gradually stopped hosting dinner gatherings. For a long time I didn’t even notice the shift. It happened organically as our kids and our friends’ kids enrolled in different schools and pursued different interests.

Some of our core communities and friendships shifted into new spaces. Others gradually faded away altogether.

New friendships were forged along the sidelines of the soccer field or on the sidewalk at the periphery of the elementary school as we waited for the dismissal bell. Though we liked these new friends and enjoyed the opportunities we had to connect, most of these relationships didn’t grow beyond the sidelines or the sidewalks. When soccer season ended or school let out for the summer, months passed before I crossed paths with most of these women again.

I guess what I am saying is that I miss the friendships and connections that go deeper than small talk on the sidelines. I miss the rich scent of a home-cooked meal wafting into the cold night air when we open the door to greet our guests. I miss gathering around the table, candles flickering. I miss retiring to the living room after the meal, dessert plates balanced on our knees. I miss rich conversation and laughing until my stomach hurts.

On one hand, this is the season of life we are in right now – shuttling older kids to tennis lessons and cross country meets and math tutoring. Attending orchestra concerts, cheering on sidelines, proofreading English essays, dropping a carload of boys off at the movies.

Life is full. Life is busy.

At the same time, though, I think “this season,” “this busyness,” might also be an excuse I’ve allowed myself. In the same way I’ve become complacent about chasing curiosity, I’ve also grown complacent in pursuing rich, meaningful friendships.

This kind of relationship-building takes work. True community requires intentionality. Authentic connection that goes beyond sideline small talk requires time, trust, and a willingness of be vulnerable.

Inviting someone into your home to sit around your table invites intimacy on a deeper level – even more so, perhaps than meeting in a restaurant or another public space.Sometimes I think I choose sideline small talk because it’s easy, non-threatening, and doesn’t take much work.

I am lucky to have had (and still have) true friendship with Deidra. But that relationship and its shift into new territory these last couple of months has taught me something important. Life is full and busy, to be sure. But it’s neither too full nor too busy to pursue deeper, more fulfilling friendships that go beyond sideline small talk.

This year, I’m going to get back into the habit of practicing hospitality – of inviting new friends and old into my home and around my table. It’s a small step in the journey toward forming and growing authentic relationships, but it’s an important one – one I’ve neglected for far too long. And as a friend wisely noted, it might turn out that my two themes for the year — curiosity and hospitality — will go quite nicely together, each complementing the other.

This post is Part 2 in my two-part Themes for 2018 series. Two weeks ago I wrote about the Year of Curiosity, which you can read here.

Practicing the Ministry of Presence

June 28, 2017 By Michelle 19 Comments

Hi friends – I’m still on a blogging break, but I wanted to share my monthly column I wrote for the Journal Star with you. Thanks for your patience and grace as I take a little breather from (most of) my writing.

Three weeks ago, the 33-year-old son of one of my father’s closest friends drowned while swimming in a small Massachusetts lake. According to reports, he jumped from a boat into the water and never resurfaced.

My parents were sleeping when the phone rang. At that point the body had not yet been found and recovered from the lake. My father’s friend, Don, and his wife had learned their son was missing and presumed dead when a police officer had knocked on their door that night. My dad was one of the first people they called.

After he got off the phone, my father dressed quickly and drove the short distance to his friend’s house, where he spent some time with him and his wife. The next morning my dad was at the lake with Don and his wife when the divers resumed their search. He was there again the following morning when the divers finally recovered the body.

Later, in a phone conversation with my dad, I asked him what he had done during all the hours he had spent at the lake. “Nothing really,” he said. “I was just there.”

My dad said most of the time he had sat on a bench a little ways away from the beach where the search and recovery operation was centered. Don came and sat next to him from time to time. They would talk a little bit, and then Don would get up from the bench to be with his wife or another one of his family members.

“He said he wanted me there, so I was there,” my dad said.

Often our inclination is to run in the opposite direction in the face of another person’s suffering or grief. We tend to make excuses for ourselves — “She would rather be alone…The family needs privacy right now…There’s nothing I can really do to help…” – because we are uncomfortable and afraid. When we do summon the courage to show up, we often feel compelled to do something or say something we think, or at least hope, will be helpful.

This isn’t to say that making a meal or mowing the lawn or offering prayers and condolences aren’t valuable things to do when someone you know is suffering. They are. But sometimes, especially in the earliest stages when grief is still registering as shock, simply coming alongside someone who is suffering when everyone else is turning away can be a precious gift.

Baptist minister Reverend Jeffrey Brown calls this practice of showing up the “ministry of presence.” “I find that among the most effective ways to do ministry is to shut up and just be there,” Brown said.

My dad and Don have known each other for 46 years. They both worked as guidance counselors at the same small high school in Connecticut. They are close in the way men of their generation often are. They attend one another’s milestone events, like retirement parties and children’s weddings. They go out to dinner together with their wives, or visit over beers on the back deck. They don’t often talk a lot about personal stuff. Yet my dad was the one Don called when tragedy struck. And my dad showed up.

Sitting on a lakeside bench in the background hour after hour doesn’t sound like much of an offering in the face of unimaginable tragedy. But in his small, unobtrusive way, my dad practiced the ministry of presence. He was there for his friend, and his presence — simple, quiet, and unadorned — was a gift.

Why We Need Both Solitude and Community

March 28, 2017 By Michelle 1 Comment

Two weeks ago my husband and our two boys spent spring break in Minnesota. I stayed home with only the dog and the lizard for company in order to prepare for a speaking engagement at the end of the week.

I’d looked forward to my week alone for a long time. The thought of hours of quiet and uncluttered kitchen counters made me giddy with anticipation. I stocked my freezer with Lean Cuisines, borrowed a stack of novels from the library, purchased a large bar of dark chocolate and a bottle of Malbec, and tuned the television to HGTV. I could hardly wait for my troupe to hit the road on Sunday morning. As the car rounded the corner, I waved from the front door with a grin on my face.

The first few hours were all I had imagined. I took a nap in a square of sunshine pooling on the sofa. I ate my Asian Chicken with Peanut Sauce sitting on a barstool at the kitchen counter with a book in my hand. I watched four HGTV programs back-to-back.

But by Monday afternoon my giddiness had ebbed, and by Tuesday I had fallen into a funk.

I began to space out my errands so I’d have something to do each day. I talked aloud to the dog on our afternoon walks, oblivious of what passersby might think. I was lonely. I missed my people, even the pre-teen who tended to talk at the decibel level of a Boeing 747 before I had my morning coffee.

Turns out, I needed community more than I had thought.

Forester Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees, notes that contrary to popular belief, trees that grow closely together in a forest are more likely to survive and thrive than those with ample space between them. Rather than competing for natural resources, trees – especially those of the same species – synchronize their rate of photosynthesis and divide their water and nutrients via their root systems so that all can be equally successful.

In fact, even sick or weak trees are nourished by their neighbors, because the trees know that they are only as strong individually as the entire forest as a whole.

As I learned from my week alone, human beings are more like trees than we might expect. God knew that human beings, like trees, thrive in community. We need each other for nourishment, connection, and support. This is exactly why God created Eve as a companion to Adam.

“It is not good for the man to be alone,” God observed (Genesis 2:18). Even with the great variety of plants and animals in the Garden of Eden, God realized Adam needed a like-minded companion with whom to share the triumph and travail of life on earth.

Silence and solitude are important because they offer us the space and time to connect with ourselves and God. Likewise, community is equally vital, offering us companionship and, like the trees in a forest, nourishment and resources to sustain us. The key, I’ve learned, is not to overindulge in one at the expense of the other, but to aim for a healthy balance of both.

This post first ran in the Lincoln Journal Star on March 26, 2017.

Sometimes You Just Need a Little Library in Your Yard

November 4, 2015 By Michelle 4 Comments

I watched from my office window this morning as a man stopped in front of my house. He unlatched the door of the tiny turquoise structure that’s perched on a post outside the picket fence and ducked his head out of sight. When he resumed his walk, his Labrador straining the leash, golden river birch leaves falling at his feet, the man held a book in his hand.

From the moment I caught my first glimpse of a Little Free Library (LFL) – the one at the curb on Sheridan Boulevard, a miniature replica of the classic bungalow behind it — I was smitten. As the years passed and additional LFLs sprung up in neighborhoods around Lincoln, I grew more and more enchanted.

Back in 2009 Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a model of a one-room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother, a former teacher who loved reading. He put it on a post in his front yard and filled it with books. His neighbors and friends loved it, so he made several more and gave them away. Six years later, it’s estimated there are approximately 25,000 Little Free Libraries worldwide.

Last month, I decided I wanted LFL #25,001 in my front yard.

“It says right here you can make one in a weekend,” I said to Brad, as I scrolled through sample blueprints online. “Come on, it’ll be fun,” I cajoled.

Needless to say, I must have missed the website’s fine print. Clearly they had carpenter, not English professor, in mind when they suggested the LFL as a weekend project.

…I’m writing about our adventure of building our very own Little Free Library over at Tweetspeak today. Join me for the rest of this sweet story over there?

Why Building Bridges Doesn’t Happen Overnight

August 4, 2015 By Michelle 13 Comments

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I’ve been running a new route these days, not because I want to, but because my typical trail is closed due to construction. The bridge that spans the trail I usually run has been demolished and is being reconstructed.

I don’t like my new route. For starters, it’s longer. And it also includes the addition of two hills, whereas the trail I usually run is completely flat. Plus I’m forced to run along the road now, jumping on and off curbs, navigating a sidewalk that’s full of potholes, cracks and fissures. I miss the familiar, smooth path through the quiet woods that I know so well, I could almost run it blindfolded.

Progress on the new bridge is slow. Yesterday morning I stood behind the orange striped blockade and surveyed the construction, bulldozers lumbering up mountains of gravel, men in dirty jeans and hard hats yelling orders over the roar of machines. I noticed that after three months, the new bridge is still barely a scaffold. I wondered if the bridge would be done by the end of the year. I wondered if it would ever be done.

My friend Deidra and I first met five or six years ago. We became acquainted online first, tiptoeing our first tentative steps toward one another in the blog comment box. A couple months later on a frigid winter night we recognized each other at a local coffee shop, just from our tiny profile pictures on our blogs. A few weeks (or maybe it was months?) after that we met for lunch. I was early; she was a few minutes late. As I sat on a bench in the restaurant’s foyer I worried that she’d had second thoughts. Later, over our sandwiches and salads, she peppered me with questions, like an interview. I think we were both a little bit nervous.

I was unsure of myself in this new friendship. In a lot of ways forging a new friendship is like dating. You want to make a good impression, woo the person. And in this case, with Deidra and me, it felt a little bit trickier, because I am white and she is black, and for me, this was new ground.

I’m embarrassed to admit that Deidra is my first black friend. I don’t even like the way that sounds, but frankly, after typing and deleting, typing and deleting, I don’t know how else to say it. I’ve been acquainted with people of color here and there throughout my life, but friends? The kind of friend who knows you inside and out — your secrets, your flaws, your gifts, your fears? Never. It seems, for someone who is 45 years old, for someone who graduated from a university with 26,000 students, for someone who calls herself liberal, progressive, open-minded, that this shouldn’t be the case. But it is. And so for me, this new friendship was something different; it was new terrain, a new path. It felt a little bit like building a brand-new bridge.

I’ve made a few blunders along the way, like the fact that I’d assumed Deidra was white when I first “met” her online – I thought she was Italian, from what I could tell from her tiny blog profile picture. Years later, when I finally got up the courage to admit this out loud to Deidra, she acknowledged it without judgment and with so much grace.

I’ve made other assumptions that have all turned out to be wrong, as assumptions usually do. The first time I visited her church (Baptist), I assumed there’d be lots of Amen-ing out loud and hand-raising and ladies bedecked in fancy Sunday hats. Apparently, at least with regard to fashion, I conflated Baptists and the Kentucky Derby.

I’ve also said the wrong things from time to time; I know I’ve questioned, “Should I have said that?” I know I’ve hesitated, second-guessed things I’ve written in emails or said out loud. I’ve stumbled through voicemails and Voxer messages, stuttering and stammering and then hanging up and thinking, “Well that was exactly not what I wanted to say.” It hasn’t always been pretty and neat, at least on my end.

In the early months and years of our friendship Deidra and I stayed on safe, neutral ground. We talked about blogging, writing, shoes, books, kids, food, sometimes about faith. As the years have passed we’ve eased into conversations about race and other more challenging topics slowly, little by little, over time. These conversations have gotten easier, more natural and comfortable as we’ve built this bridge bit by bit on a foundation of mutual respect, trust and love, on a foundation of real friendship.

Building bridges in relationships (especially with those you might consider different from you), just like building actual bridges, takes time. It’s slow work. Sometimes it’s hard and a little bit gritty. Sometimes you might even have to take a detour, the longer route full of cracks and fissures and potholes. For a long time, you might wonder, as you look at the heaps of dirt, the foundation of the bridge barely laid, if there’s been any progress at all. You might wonder, as you stand there surveying the scene, if the bridge is really ever going to be finished, if the two sides will ever really connect.

Yesterday morning I stood behind the construction sign and observed the concrete, the steel girders, pilings and beams, the rebar that will lay hidden beneath the pavement, a tapestry of metal that will hold the whole structure of the bridge in place. I watched the crane and the bulldozer, saw the dirt, mud and dust, the piles of debris. It didn’t look like much yet, but the longer I stood there, the more I knew, the more I could see what it was all becoming.

As I stood behind the construction sign with my hands on my hips, I saw the beginnings of a bridge that will span a gap. I saw the future. I saw what the slow but steady progress and the hard work will build. I saw that two sides will come together, the gap will be bridged, and what is created in that process will be strong, stable, beautiful and new.

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