Beyond One Word

I am a Christian.  I have a Muslim friend who’s family is sweet, loving and generous. Every time I see her, she reminds me to call her for the next Girls’ Night Out and she’s also an incredible cook.  I have a Wiccan friend who has loved me through my ugliest days and has a laugh that is absolutely infectious.  Even 20 years later, I think about the cozy apartment she shared with her husband.  I remember how excited she was to show me the new little glass candies she purchased to decorate her home.  She knows how to make you feel like an honored guest and she can’t say the words “sheep” and “Coke Cola” without pronouncing them “sheepum” and “tikka teera”.   I have a Buddhist neighbor who goes with me on my morning walks after we see our kids off to school.  We talk about her struggles with being a single mom and how it’s hard to know the difference between loving children through service, and enabling them, especially once they become adults.  Both our moms are far away and we share our worries about being able to take care of them when the distance is so great. She’s much better about calling her mom than I am.
 
I am an immigrant from the Philippines. I have a Jamaican friend who prays in such a deeply spiritual language, her longing and love for God is evident to anyone who listens.  She continues the art of writing hand-written notes and when you are the lucky recipient of these notes, it feels like a precious gift.  She expresses love through gifts of all kinds.  I have a Puerto Rican in my family who is a vegetarian and loves CrossFit but she never makes you feel less if you don’t participate.  She is one of the most loving people I know and she receives a kind gesture in a way that makes you believe you’ve done something meaningful.  She is as lovely on the inside as she is on the outside. I have an Italian friend who has so much history with me, there is an ease with boldness and laughter there that I am grateful for.  I know that when she asks, “Are the brownies done?”, it really means, “Get the brownies out of the oven.  I’m ready to have one.”   She is one of the first people I called when I came to faith.

I am a wife and mother. Before I became who I am today, a gay couple flew from Atlanta to upstate New York to make sure I got on a plane.  They were gentleman who escorted me out of  a relationship that I was convinced would end in death, for me or for him.  They gave me a future and will always be two of my heroes.

In these sentences, there is an opportunity for you to focus on one word.  One word that may have distracted you from the rest, in a way that made you miss the POINT.  Single words are like that.  They have the ability to devalue, to diminish, de-humanize, to separate and to dismiss. People are not single words.  We are rich volumes of history and tragedy, drama and triumph, joy and struggle.  In a world where the sound of someone’s laughter is too often reduced to “LOL”, we forget that.  Our pace is so fast we evaluate someone’s value by bullet points and what we’re told by an electronic device.  As a culture, we don’t make the time to THINK and CONNECT anymore…and I’m just as guilty.

I don’t agree with many of the people I care about.  In every relationship, regardless of who it’s with, we are going to go in opposite directions on many issues.  What I look for, though, is something to connect us so we find our way back to each other, through all of it.  There’s hope in that, a tomorrow, a lack of destruction.  There is hope when relationships are rooted in a foundation of love and respect.  You can’t continue together if you don’t even allow for a beginning.  Stories are built one word at a time, until there is a story to tell.  People don’t stop at single words.

In saying that, I know who I am in each of these relationships.  No one will dissuade from my faith. Jesus IS my compass.  I am not ashamed of being an immigrant.  I am a patriot who loves my adopted country but honors my roots. I strive daily to be a contributing citizen.  I am happy to be in a marriage with a man who is precious to me and balances me out.  We work every day to be better than who we’ve been and we support each other on that journey, even when it gets hard.  I am a grateful parent to one who gives me purpose.  I pray that my legacy is one of generational growth.
It’s not possible to know everyone with depth but our hope starts with the acknowledgement that DEPTH EXISTS, in all of us, beyond one word.