Talking to Strangers

It was Sunday morning. I stopped at my favorite, may or may not have chosen my new house based on proximity to this place, donut joint to buy a couple dozen for our new member class. (I win souls for the Lord with vanilla glazed and pumpkin spice varieties).

It was early. Still dark out. There was one other person in the place, and I mean, she looked normal enough… She was being pretty chatty with the register girl, so I jumped into the conversation. Because hey, it’s Sunday morning, there’s a good donut smell, and we’re all friends here.

In hindsight, I could not retrace for you the journey from friendly banter to crazy town. But what I can tell you is that it all started out ok, but ended up encompassing topics including, but not limited to: demon possession; hoarders (and the demons that possess hoarders); abortion; mental illness (and the demons that cause it, and the prayer than can fix it better than medication or therapy); school shootings; and how ultimately, all human ills are the fault of the President, who speaks demonic forces over our nation because he does not believe in “our” God. You know, “the God who started this country.”

Lord, in your mercy…

At some point, I jumped in with a hopefully-gracious “ANYway… Ima buy some donuts now,” much to the relief of the utterly trapped looking girl behind the register. “Thank you,” she sighed as the door swung blessedly closed. “She’d been here for AWHILE.”

This is what happens when you talk to strangers before breakfast.

Problem is, I always talk to strangers. It is my spiritual discipline.

The world is set up to let us avoid each other entirely. In the Phoenix suburbs, where I spent 7 years, the yards are all fenced in by a 6 foot concrete wall. It is so shoe-melting hot most of the year, people pull right into the garage, put the door down, and try to slip into their air-conditioned meat locker of a house without letting any of the desert slip in behind them. In the Midwest, it’s better. People are friendlier, the fences are a little lower, and at least 3 seasons of the year, people are out in the world together.

Even so, it is easy to move through a whole day, even week of your life without speaking to a single person who doesn’t live in your house.

Think about all the ways this is true. You can check yourself out at the grocery store and swipe your own card, so as not to speak to those pesky perky cashiers. You can hit a drive-thru for a latte, the dry cleaning, or a bank deposit. If we still rented videos, you could drop those off at a window too, but who needs that when you can stream the movie directly to your television? You can drop off your library books in an outdoor drop box. In many ways, the library is the last vestige of civilization, but even there, you don’t have to actually go IN.

You can take your kids through the drop off line at school—and for the love of all that is, if you want to lose all faith in the goodness of creation, try dropping off a kid at school—so you never have to encounter another parent. I am not in favor of this drop-off, drive-by way of life… but sometimes the drop-off experience makes me glad that I am not in a face to face situation with that guy in the big truck who makes an illegal left turn into the school EVERY DAY, and then gets in a hyper-entitled suburban shouting match with the teacher who politely asks him to go to the back of the line.

So, ok, maybe we have our reasons for limiting engagement with the unknown elements: the screaming dad; the no-boundaries Target lady of Kristen Wiig fame, (who let’s face it, is probably a real person); or the racist faith healer in line for donuts. They’ve ruined it for everyone.

When you talk to strangers, you open yourself up to all sorts of uncomfortable things, but all sorts of lovely things too. That’s why it is a discipline. It is a gamble of the highest holy persuasion, because when we engage the unknown, we might be changed by it.  And that is dang scary.

In years of talking to strangers (some stranger than others), I don’t have a single direct and literal story of how one casual conversation led to a new church member, a dramatically changed life, or a major community issue overcome by compassion and teamwork. But I know for sure that I am changed by the readiness to meet a fellow broken wanderer, out there in the world. I am somehow transformed in the waiting for coffee, the cashing of checks, the changing of vehicle fluids.

Maybe not so much the dropping off of children at school. But, God as our witness, we are over here trying.

I am changed in each of these places, because in every moment of openness and vulnerability, there is a blessed chipping away of all that is closed-off, frozen over, sanctimonious, and fearful of the ‘other.’ There is no other way—listen, there is no other way– to scrape that junk off, except to walk around with a willingness to be scraped at. It is a willingness to believe that there is a potential for grace in every connection… Even the ones that seem to turn awkward or sour almost immediately. Maybe in those, we glimpse a little part of ourselves that we’d like to see a lot less of. Maybe we try harder to subvert those baser impulses, and be the kind of stranger that we would most like to meet.

And this too: if you didn’t endure strangeness, you may never get intercede for the girl behind the counter. You may never get tell her that not ALL Christians think our president (or anyone) is the devil. You might never get to tell her about the church, just up the road, that has a pretty different story of how God moves and works in the world. And that story is full of goodness, and those people eat donuts together.

So maybe she should come see us sometime.