Welcome back, lover of the cute little anectdote drawn from observations of day-to-day life in my neck of the woods!
I cannot fail to observe the following phenomenon: a couple of years back, my divorced mum met a new partner, Tom, who had been very isolated in the decade that preceded their meeting. Broadly speaking, he could not stop talking, all the time, and for hours on ends, about a whole lot of random stuff. To be honest it was fairly annoying, but my mum kept saying that it was getting better, and her partner is otherwise a fairly impressive all-round good egg.
Next door to my mum's lives a deaf man, Frank, who's not got the best of social skills. He would ring your bell every twenty minutes and is fairly pushy. To be honest this too can be annoying and his beahviour has driven away exasperated neighbours who ended up hating his guts and selling their house just to get away from the guy. My mum just thinks he's a bit pushy, but that it's hard acquiring a grasp of normal (read incredibly individualistic) social norms when you're deaf, isolated, and hated by your neighbours, so she does not mind him and is fairly welcoming.
But Tom and Frank get on like a house on fire! They "chat" all day long and have lunch together whenever they can, or whenever they know that their neighbour is likely at home alone and would love the company. As a result, Frank loves my mum's house, watches the cat, and rings her bell to give her and Tom home-made soup quite often.
Ten months ago, one of my school acquaintances moved into the house which lies on the other side of Frank's house with her partner and three children. I urged her to go and speak to my mum so she could learn about Frank and not start hating him. I have never been so insistant in my life, I pressed the point like a maniac, but I did not think she would go. In fact she did. So far she has no problems with Frank and does not resent his clumsy pushiness. She also decided to re-arrange her home like my mum's (the houses are built the same, but the walls and stairs were in different places and she likes my mum's better).
So there I go with my little story of flawed, communicant members of the body of Christ who are all divorced, pushy, talkative, hurting in so many ways, and are having a ball of a time together. I don't really like pontifying cute stories, even when I write them myself, because they are the essence of the toothless spirituality I grew up with. But deep down I know that in that story, I would have been the exasperated neighbour who sold their homes to get away. And so I write cute stories. Hell, Jesus told cute stories. And at the end of the day love lives on my street (the awesome lyrics can be found here)!
I cannot fail to observe the following phenomenon: a couple of years back, my divorced mum met a new partner, Tom, who had been very isolated in the decade that preceded their meeting. Broadly speaking, he could not stop talking, all the time, and for hours on ends, about a whole lot of random stuff. To be honest it was fairly annoying, but my mum kept saying that it was getting better, and her partner is otherwise a fairly impressive all-round good egg.
Next door to my mum's lives a deaf man, Frank, who's not got the best of social skills. He would ring your bell every twenty minutes and is fairly pushy. To be honest this too can be annoying and his beahviour has driven away exasperated neighbours who ended up hating his guts and selling their house just to get away from the guy. My mum just thinks he's a bit pushy, but that it's hard acquiring a grasp of normal (read incredibly individualistic) social norms when you're deaf, isolated, and hated by your neighbours, so she does not mind him and is fairly welcoming.
But Tom and Frank get on like a house on fire! They "chat" all day long and have lunch together whenever they can, or whenever they know that their neighbour is likely at home alone and would love the company. As a result, Frank loves my mum's house, watches the cat, and rings her bell to give her and Tom home-made soup quite often.
Ten months ago, one of my school acquaintances moved into the house which lies on the other side of Frank's house with her partner and three children. I urged her to go and speak to my mum so she could learn about Frank and not start hating him. I have never been so insistant in my life, I pressed the point like a maniac, but I did not think she would go. In fact she did. So far she has no problems with Frank and does not resent his clumsy pushiness. She also decided to re-arrange her home like my mum's (the houses are built the same, but the walls and stairs were in different places and she likes my mum's better).
So there I go with my little story of flawed, communicant members of the body of Christ who are all divorced, pushy, talkative, hurting in so many ways, and are having a ball of a time together. I don't really like pontifying cute stories, even when I write them myself, because they are the essence of the toothless spirituality I grew up with. But deep down I know that in that story, I would have been the exasperated neighbour who sold their homes to get away. And so I write cute stories. Hell, Jesus told cute stories. And at the end of the day love lives on my street (the awesome lyrics can be found here)!
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