Hope Does Float

I am a big advocate of prayer. Wait! I saw you. Did you just roll your eyes at me? Now, I am no spiritual guru. If you are looking for someone who can quote the Bible, I’m not your girl. If you are wanting to sing all the songs we learned in Vacation Bible School together, good luck. I didn’t go. Contemporary Christian hits of the 80s-90s – I don’t know any of them. But if you’ve been kicked around by the world a good bit and just want an understanding shoulder to cry on, baby, pull up a chair. I will make the coffee. BYOC – bring your own creamer. I don’t use that nasty stuff. I can force you to have faith once again. See, this is a story about an introvert who is now a Bible study table leader.

I detest crowds. Unless you’re new here, you know I would rather eat nails than walk into a room where everyone might turn around and look at me. I grab my phone at traffic lights, not because I’m calling someone, but because the person in the car next to me might be looking in my direction. When I’m on one of my long morning walks, I pretend to be talking to someone on my headphones, lest a passerby stuck at a red light were to attempt eye contact. I am awkward. Life is awkward. Forget over the rainbow, under the radar is the place to be. See, I would never throw my hat in the ring to lead anyone anywhere. I abhor group projects, except that one time in the 5th grade when we made a slideshow of moving, stick figure polar bears for TAG. I oversaw the polar bear clothes. Think paper dolls but with bears, tuxedos, and boas. I digress. So, how did I wind up with a knotted stomach and a headache on certain mornings of the week, prepping for Bible study with a table of fourteen women, most of whom I’d never met before? I prayed. Funny thing about prayer, the answer hits hard but never the way you expect.

For the last 38 years (holy graduation, have I really been out of high school that long), I have prayed for friends. Please give me friends, God. Lord, I could really use friends. God, I want to be the Lucy to someone’s Ethel. Ok, God, I will be the Ethel, just find me a Lucy. I am 100% positive God did just that. But, you can’t find blessings with your eyes closed, or while pretending to be on the phone, or with your head down when you enter a room. So, many friends I have not had. If you could see my resolutions from every January 1st since 1985, you’d see “make a friend” near the top. And, I did manage to occasionally buddy up here and there, just not with people who loved me despite my faults, beyond the acquaintance label. Recently, though, a couple of years ago, with age and experience on my side, I began praying differently. Something clicked in my brain’s prayer lobe. Instead of asking God to make a certain thing happen, I began praying that He would open a closed mind and heal a broken heart. I didn’t want my way anymore. I just wanted God to help me see His. I prayed for realization, for acceptance, for clarity. God, just transform me and give me the strength to see what you want me to see.

Last year, God answered me with a new church home – honestly, a new religion. I am still nauseated when I walk into the room, but there are, pardon the pun, honest to God friends there! People drop off soup when I am sick. I go to their homes and know things like where they keep the extra toilet paper. This year He answered me with a phone call from my Bible study table leader asking me if she could pass me a baton. I said yes. I might have also thrown up in my mouth a little. It’s no ordinary Bible study, either. It’s Jenn Stinking Wilkin, the queen of color-coded note taking. Jenn speaks in Shakespearean prose. You cannot stress just the important things when she talks because EVERYTHING is important. Jenn cries legit tears when she talks about God. There you sit, with tears of your own and fogged up glasses. It’s impossible to know if you just grabbed the red marker or the hot pink marker, and it matters. She said something that resonated deeply with me in this week’s video. “Wisdom is basically someone saying, ‘I’ve seen a lot of people do a lot of dumb stuff.’” Thinking of wise Bible hero types shaking their heads at the rest of humanity seemed so, well, human, hopeful even.

How am I doing? We are two classes in, and I haven’t died or passed out yet. I have managed to be early but not annoyingly early each time. I have greeted and hugged and used good eye contact and made small talk…and it has been AMAZING! I even tackled that most angst-ridden activity – public prayer. The first time I prayed us out and dismissed our table, I was nervous, so nervous. I said something about us all being new to each other. “Beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it’s what’s in the middle that counts. So, when you find yourself at the beginning, just give hope a chance to float up. And it will.” Yep, I quoted Sandra Bullock. But, I think God is ok with that. Hope Floats was a great movie.