The People You Choose Not to Talk To

I saw her across the corridor, struggling a bit with her Ergo carrier while tugging the baby’s feet into the slots below. A baby with Down syndrome is easily recognizable, perhaps more so for us because we have two children with that diagnosis. My heart raced across the room, offering her words of superlative wisdom and an encouragement that she would carry the rest of the day. My feet, however, stayed by our airline bags, because my mouth hadn’t decided what it could possibly say that would not at least initially feel awkward. As we both went our ways, I felt a bit like a ghost, moving about in the world with the Holy Spirit, with decades of experience, with a full heart towards mamas like me…but with trepidation and a cocoon of safety some might call privacy but others charge a lack of love. They will ask when they want help, I think, laughably, remembering my own young mothering and my thirst for someone to come alongside with cheer and comfort without my having to beg for the Lord to bring it.

So we—Tom and myself—boarded the airplane for our flight, and found our separated seats (no thanks to the airline for trying to squeeze out more dollars for the privilege of assigning seats together). I sat by the sorta-window, half hidden by the seat behind me. Next to me was a young man slouching so much I thought he’d slip out of his baggy pants and glide his skinny body right underneath the seat in front of him. Unlike that young mother, I didn’t have to cross an aisle to speak to him; we were both going to be trapped together 30,000 feet in the air BY an aisle.

“Heading home?” I asked. And that’s how we launched into conversation regarding where “home” is (we both wandered around in our childhoods), the military (I was a brat, he regrets not joining), and the pandemic (both feeling out of sorts but what can we do). I wonder how much more we could have discussed had we not traded seats across that aisle to sit with our personal traveling partners. I kind of regret initiating that seat switch, but maybe he appreciated the nap he got.

We all seem to be living life in our own bubbles, and this began long before social distancing. Jesus was good at popping those bubbles and engaging with people with real and earnest conversation in time and space. I have a lot to learn, and I know He’s going to teach me, first about an awareness of others. And about loving people more than loving my self-centered comfort zone. About caring about people enough to ask, listen, hearten, advise, and assist as I am able…instead of allowing social media, news outlets, and angry drivers (safe in their wrapped steel of shame) to shape my attitudes about what and how people think. In my experience, talking to people in person rarely reflects what the world is saying about them, saying about us.

Perhaps the flesh-and-blood folks the good Lord puts in our paths whom we choose not to talk to are the very people with which we should. We’re not isolated phantoms, and I for one am going to endeavor to stop behaving like one.