Saying what goes unsaid

Sometimes words are hard to come by. While I've never been an avid blogger, and I realize that there are few who probably have any interest in what I would have to say (as the quote about the internet goes: Never have so many people had so little to say), I have been somewhat at a loss for words in recent months. For the sake of my own privacy, as well as for the sake of my time, I won't go into great detail about what has been going on, at least not in such a public forum. Maybe someday, when I have been able to travel a little further down this road a little longer. But not now. Not yet.

Needless to say, the past few months have been a hard road and an uphill battle. Sometimes, it is a far easier thing to simply let things remain the way that they always have been. Healing sounds like a wonderful concept, but we seldom realize in advance how much pain the healing process can bring. I have been aware of certain issues in my own life for the better part of 15 years; while not issues of sin, about 5 months ago, I became aware of just how much they had infected the whole of my being- from the way that I relate to God, to the way that I work, to the way that I make and maintain friendships. For nearly a decade and a half, I have subconsciously pushed people out of my life- usually because of the assumption that I have maintained for a long time: they simply did not care. It's not true. I know that. But the link between knowing, believing, and acting is so, so delicate.

I have become aware of how much of my life has been dominated by silence. Due to varying factors in my life, I have come to labour under the assumption that if I were needed or wanted, I would be requested. The problem with our culture is that it is more than willing to affirm such assumptions. Much like our spirituality, we often find our friendships and our relationships to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

Every day, we ask and are asked the question, "how are you?", and we all, invariably, answer "fine", regardless of our actual condition. In the name of privacy, we seal ourselves off from the very people that God intended for our support and mutual edification. We settle for wallposts on Facebook, while some of can't even remember the last time we were hugged, went out for a cup of coffee, or truly were able to pour our hearts out to someone who we knew wouldn't care how silly our cares were, because they care more about us more than they care about Farmville, Youtube, or homework. Listening to each other and interacting with each other has become a lost art. These days, if you want someone to sit and listen to you, you have to pay them by the hour.

And what have we gained?

We have become disconnected from one another. We are losing our ability to listen and be listened to as surely as a bedridden patient loses their ability to use their legs. Some of us have become so desperate for attention that they feel the need to tweet or post every minute thing they do as a Facebook status update. I think, if anything, this comes from our need to be noticed, to feel that somehow what we do matters. Instead of picking up the phone and making a call or taking the time to send an actual card to wish someone a happy birthday, we graciously make the effort to type those 14 characters into a text box, click post and count our duty complete, regardless if it's for our dearest friend or that strange guy we have a hazy memory of from high school. And we wonder why depression is the most common diagnosis in the western world.

We've become the punchline of a sad joke: like the proverbial fool who gets locked in a grocery store and starves to death, we are starved for real connection and friendly intimacy while the scientific community frets about overpopulation. It breaks my heart to think that even when we do engage in real social interaction, we seldom even see the people that we are spending time with because we are constantly barraged by the buzzing and singing of mobile devices ushering in a flood of text messages and notifications that constantly beckon us to rejoin our virtual lives. Perhaps virtual is the wrong word. Artificial might be more apt.

Despite what you may think, I am not a Luddite. In fact, I think that all of this technology can be a great asset. That being said, short of pointing a gun at me, you won't be able to convince me to buy a cellphone. I'm simply a man who is tired of the status quo. I am prone to isolation and, to be frank, I have found it disturbingly easy to hide from the rest of the world. While on the one hand, it seems as though the world is kicking my door in and inviting itself into my home through the internet, it can also take an exceptional amount of work to make any kind of real connection, since most of us only have about enough patience to sit through a video on Youtube. If there's anything I've learned, it's that real people can't be connected with in less than 10 minutes, or in 350 characters or less.

I had an astounding thing happen to me the other day, and as a result I have taken two steps to reclaim territory in my life on behalf of other people.

I had spent a considerable amount of time in recent weeks speculating on what I would say if someone were to ask me how I was doing who really wanted to know the answer, and was willing to take the time to listen and understand the answer. In a more cynical (or perhaps realistic) moment, I concluded that such an occurrence was a statistical near-improbability, and it was foolish to even think about it.

The very next day, I received an email from a former youth who, at the age of 17, has a wisdom beyond his years. He asked me, quite simply, how I was doing, and informed me that just saying "O.K." was not a sufficient reply.

I stared at the flashing cursor for a few minutes, and debated coming out of hiding or putting up my usual disguise. After all, it was an easy thing to joke about how busy life had gotten, being involved in vocational church ministry, as well as a being a full-time graduate student. I could tell him about the growing menagerie that currently dwells under my roof (currently sitting at four cats and a dog), and talk about how much I enjoyed being in youth ministry, and regale him with stories of the youth in my current ministry who remind me of so-and-so from our days together in youth ministry when I was his pastor. I could totally and cleverly avoid the question without even having to lie.

But to tell the truth, I've grown too tired to lift the disguise. Only half of the fun in a game of hide-and-seek is the actual hiding. So I wrote him a short novel explaining what I had been going through the past 15 years, especially the last 4 months. In the process of writing, something inside of me broke, and I found myself weeping over my keyboard because I was able to share myself with someone who actually wanted to listen, even if the only connection that we were able to access was email. The late Mike Yaconelli once said that our tears live where our longings are, and I had opened a floodgate.

I realized that I was faced with a simple choice. I had managed to take of the face I show the world for someone who had offered to listen, and I had come away unharmed. Would it be such a crime to offer that same ear to someone else, and to ask for the use of theirs? Would anyone be offended to be asked to listen, and to be listened to in return?

A few days ago, I took my second step and asked a friend that very thing, a guy who I've known for years, and has been like another younger brother to me for a long time. Part of the fear of doing something like that, for any of us, is our fear that somehow the people we love and respect will somehow think less of us if they become aware that we are human and can bleed like anyone else. The funny thing is, they've known we were human all along. Odds are, if your heart is longing for a connection, theirs is, too.

So where am I going with this wandering, borderline epic (in the literary sense) of a blog post?

You're not alone. Sometimes, it's so easy to feel that you are adrift on a sea of faces and dying of thirst. Social media and cellphones with unlimited texting so often feel like a big old mouthful of salt water: it seems like a good idea at the time, and you keep drinking and wondering why on earth you are still so thirsty. It's a shadow of real, personal connection. What it's so easy to forget is that you are surrounded by people who long for the same things you do.

"It's not good for people to be alone." That's one of the first statement that God makes about people in the Bible- we are custom designed to interact with each other.

As usual, the best advice I have to give you is biblical- I really believe that the Golden Rule applies in places and situations like the ones we find ourselves in. Show someone else the love that you so deeply crave.

Reach out and touch the life of someone else. Speak the words that you yourself long to hear. Ask the questions that you wish someone would take the time to ask you. I think that sometimes it really is that simple.

Lonely travelers in the world, unite. You have nothing to lose. Period.