When Pretending To Be Someone Else Doesn’t Help
As soon as I saw my son’s friend’s dad, my arms began to rise like a hungry zombie, “We are going to hug you, Semi-familiar-Dude-in-the-grocery-store!”, and my brain was like, “WHAT IS HAPPENING?!”. So my arms were indicating they wanted a hug but my face was implying that a hug was a really bad idea. That poor guy. I’m just so confusing, with my arms that say “hug” and my face that says “stab”. But it gets worse! Because. My mouth was going non-stop during this terrible, terrible interaction...As I leaned in, my mouth actually said, out loud, “Oookaaay. Here we go. …We are hugging… Yup. We’re doing this. And a pat on the back. What?!.. Aaannd….DONE. *whew*!!”
That got me thinking about how many times we try to not only offer love, comfort, hope, friendliness and the like, but how many times we might feel obligated to do these things the way other people do.
Maybe your aunt was born in the kitchen and she spent every winter whipping up dozens of specialty, homemade cookies for all the neighbors. The kind that were perfectly gooey. The sort of trophy pieces of every potluck.
But you’ve always been more of the Clearance-Cookies-at-Kroger kind of girl.
Maybe your dad always hand-wrote thoughtful notes into every greeting card. Maybe his words flowed with meaning, and that exact right touch of humor, and people made a big flourish of reading them allowed and locking them away in safe deposit boxes with their other valuables.
But maybe you couldn’t write a similar piece to save your life. Maybe you have chronic writer’s block and you always end up accidentally filling your cards with cheesy phrases and overused cliches. And then you cover them with crossed out scribbles or lame stick figures.
But wouldn’t it be great if we refused to look at doing good as some sort of comparative process? Even secretly, even deep down inside? As if it helping or loving were some sort of competition won by the person who had the best vintage wrapping paper or who assigned the most lasting nicknames or who went on the longest mission trip to the farthest country?
Wouldn’t we do the world so much more good if we each loved and cared in the ways that feel natural to us? In the ways that flow out of our talents and passions?