Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: TALKATIVE (09/08/16)
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TITLE: Vulnerability | Previous Challenge Entry
By Sara Daigle
09/15/16 -
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We entered the low room and once again, I gazed around. So many lines on every face. Countenances have always fascinated me, and here was no exception. They were worn, most of them silent, but those lines on the forehead spoke of many sad tales to tell.
I walked over to the corner, willing them to open and share their lives with me. But how? I leaned against a post and refused to leave at the first awkward interactions. They were here because they needed something, and they needed more than food.
The wrinkles creased on his face as he began to see I was truly interested. This destitute man was opening up, and before long he was telling us how he would raise children to avoid being in his shoes. “Every high school kid should be required to spend a week with the homeless. He would never again begrudge work.”
Another man joined in, and we shared ideas back and forth on the upcoming election.
It was the best part of Sunday afternoon. Though filling the same plate three times over, and handing every last crumb to a young man needing food for his girlfriend proved rewarding, too. He took empty buns, cookie crumbs, and every leftover potato chip in the bowl.
In some ways I felt more at home with these people than with others in town. Not just because a few became talkative, but because they were real, so real. They had already lost their reputation, so sharing their true selves was no loss. They opened up; they let it out.
Not only the homeless need us to live our lives with them. Those people in the grocery store who give quick glances but no words; those church attendees who leave as silently as they enter; those parents at the park who wish for friends but are too silent, too cooped up in their own mask to be relatable.
When we reach out, we risk being vulnerable. We risk our own reputation, because we come to know that no one is drawn to the perfect fake. No one, not even homeless, weathered souls, want to be the object of pity, or the “poor soul the holy ones minister to.”
People open up when we open up. They can sense whether or not we know we are also broken souls, caring for them because we also know the need to be cared for. When they hear of our own silent struggles in the night, our own tears drenching the pillow, our own battles against sin and sometimes our failure in that battle, they let the guard down.
We can talk to people, or we can share with people.
In one survey, group after group of ethnic people testified to loving one missionary extraordinarily. When asked why, they all gave the same response, “He needed us.” When this man's father died, he asked his native friends to help him fly home, which they gladly did. He didn't just live among them to minister to them as someone with all the answers; he opened his heart, his need, his soul to them just as he wanted them to share their own.
Let's follow this missionary's example, and open up our own hearts just as much as want the people we minister to, to open theirs. When we know the low together, we also get to experience the victory, together. No one is meant to walk alone.
People want to talk; they just need to know we are all in the same boat, traveling the same waters.
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I was a bit confused about the "low room" you mentioned in the second paragraph, but quickly figured it out. Thank you for sharing!