I care a lot about relationships. I’m always trying to link people together or plug people into projects. I’ll meet you and say something like this:
“Oh that’s so awesome! I have to introduce you to ____. She adopted a ____ from ____, too! I know you guys could be such a support for one another.”
-or this-
“Oh that’s so awesome! We need a _____ on our next trip to Uganda. Wanna spend two weeks with me in a foreign country?”
Like some kind of human switchboard, I’m just wired to connect.
I love relationships, but I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t always get it right. In fact, often I’m just plain clunky and awkward. Something dawned on me while sitting in a roomful of high school students today at church. They were talking about fear, the fears with which we struggle, and I’ve said mine before, and it hasn’t changed. I struggle with insecurity and the fear of being misunderstood, of being judged, of saying the wrong thing. I am Foot-In-Mouth Girl, and my super power is awkwardoscity.
When you struggle with people-pleasing and insecurity, relationships are so darn tricky to navigate. It’s easier to stay inside – inside myself, inside my home, inside my comfy barrier. And yet. I find that I love relationships. I love people, and the more I get to know people, the more I love them.
I want you to hear this: you’re worth it.
You’re worth the time. You’re worth the investment. You’re worth risking everything for a relationship. You’re worth awkward small talk. (Small talk=the bane, the freaking BANE of my existence) You’re worth talking through misunderstandings. You’re worth lowering those barriers.
Why? Because we’re better together than we are apart. We need each other.
The western tendency toward individualism leaves us compartmentalized into our separate lives, like a giant egg carton. Once in awhile, someone’s egg gets smashed and spills a little onto the other one, but other than that, we live our carefully contained lives, get hard boiled right in our own individual shells, drive our separate cars, live in our separate homes, and avoid the mess.
When I meet women from other cultures and see them living life in community, raising kids together, working shoulder to shoulder, I see an omelette. Everyone’s lives are combined into one big bowl, scrambled around so that everyone is touching, like a ginormous, eggy, group hug, then fried up in a pan. With bacon. (I’m not sure what the bacon represents, but everything is just better with it, so bacon is a must in this scenario.)
(I take it back. Everything is not better with bacon, as evidenced by Creepy Bacon Baby. Now picture him saying, “Yooouuu’rrre woooorrrrrth itttt. Weeee neeeeeed eeeeeach otherrrrr.” Creepy.)
I want to risk the mess. I want to be an omelette with you. Underneath all of our quirks and insecurities, we’re just women, and we need one another.
I don’t want the hard boiled egg. Hard boiled eggs are boring. They’re perfectly protected in their hard-to-peel shells and it takes for-freaking-ever to get to the yummy yellow part carefully insulated at the very center. I want the omelette. I want the unpredictable gooey mess of white parts and yolks and maybe a pound of bacon up in there. Every singular, hard boiled egg is virtually the same. Not so with an omelette. You have an infinite number of combinations with an omelette. At a yummy breakfast place, you might find one entry for hard boiled egg, usually in the a la cart menu or not at all, but you’ll find an entire page of omelette choices.
Give me an omelette. We need each other so badly. Let’s crack up and mix it together. You are worth it. I am worth it. We are worth it.
_____________________________________________________
images from spirithalloween.com and inspiremetoday.com
