our Eastern European neighbor
On a new summer morning, while running through the thick, honeysuckle-scented air past a short, pear-shaped neighborhood street, we see our Eastern European neighbor, her silver-grey hair covered, as it always is, with a scarf the wind teases just a little in the back.
We don’t know exactly where she came from originally, but she looks like she could have stepped out of one of the old, sepia-toned, fragile-edged pictures we have of Kevin’s stony-faced Hungarian relatives, the women all beautifully wrinkled and caught in rare stillness, their calico kitchen dresses long enough to hide the runs in the knees of the stockings they wore even while rolling out the homemade noodles. When I glance down at our neighbor’s ankles, I expect to see soft, telltale rolls of nude hosiery, but am surprised to find that she’s wearing ankle socks and an old pair of tennis shoes.
Our neighbor—I haven’t yet learned her name–used to look trapped that way to me, like the strong women in those photos, sternly frozen in place, staring out at us while an image formed on film, her eyes wide and cautious. She’d pause, going all petrified bunny at the sight of us as we passed, muttering faintly under her breath before returning, quietly, to an old-world conversation on her phone.
She didn’t know us and we didn’t know her, but we saw her every day, nearly every time we went outside to walk or run, and she always seemed to be on her phone, always meandering slowly down the street, shuffling through the dust, clutching at that scarf she’d wrapped around her head from which slipped errant hanks of silver hair that glinted when the sun hit them just right.
It had taken months, maybe even a few years, until finally she’d seen us enough times that we could pass by without making her want to hide in plain sight. Feeling more than a little compassion for whatever situation had brought her here, to our little southern neighborhood with its cookie-cutter houses and pastel vinyl siding, I had offered her smile after smile and called out hundreds of warm hellos. For years. And then one day, she saw us passing and nodded, barely raising a hand in greeting before quickly glancing back down and away from us. It wasn’t much, but it was something, a flicker of recognition, and that at least was different.
I wondered about her story, if some pain that might’ve been unimaginable to me made her keep her distance. She seemed afraid, even then, that we might try to engage in conversation, maybe unsure what we would say that she couldn’t quite understand. I could hear, even in her quick hello–a word spoken so lightly I couldn’t quite catch it completely, the thick-tongued sound of another place and another history.
Something about my Eastern European neighbor reminds me of some of the women I get to mentor along the way, women who seem, at least initially, almost afraid to reach toward God, or at least, afraid to put any kind of confidence in the idea that they could grow closer to Him, could know Him familiarly.
Some of these women I love have histories of hurt that they’ve experienced in surprising contexts, others, histories with abusive lies that leave them insecure about their capacity for understanding. I’ve been blessed to know women with wide and far-reaching stories who just want to know Jesus intimately, and yet for a thousand different reasons, have felt literally too sacred-to-death to draw near. They lament, at least at first, just how hard it feels to them to feel safe about getting to know him.
I know it’s me, they often say, glancing down into their laps. It’s just something about me.
I like to tell them that often the best relationships develop slowly, and that I’m certain Jesus has all the patience in the world for them, because He’s offered an immeasurable wealth of it to me. I tell them that I’ve learned that although Jesus can heal a person immediately, He rarely does, because He wants to give us life, and everlasting life is knowing Him.
Oftentimes in the beginning, their experiences of Jesus have been a bit like a quick passing in the church aisle, if they’ve gotten that far, a furtive, careful glance over a sip of communion wine, a tentative acknowledgment in a foreign tongue as they cast their eyes down and hurry on, performing the rudimentary motions of walking while returning to more comfortable preoccupations. These women want more with God, but feel, in many cases, afraid even to speak His name in any kind of personal way. If they speak of Him at all, it’s in lecture hall terms and Bible class phrases, their ears having heard, maybe, of realities their eyes have never actually seen.
I encourage them to keep showing up, day after day, month after month, year after year, however imperfectly, to keep coming to see, because He’s flat out promised to be found by those who seek Him.
I am often asked about methodology for spiritual formation and, in the context of the question, taken back to my own early overintellectualized approach to discipleship. I specialized in notebooks with tabs and multicolored highlighters, these only representing a certain awkward tenacity in my seeking. I read the Bible through every year, and for a long season chased down its cross references. I wrote notes for miles. And I don’t mean to suggest that these approaches to following Jesus were unprofitable, but only to say that I now know, after many years standing blind before a Savior who keeps touching my eyes with His healing hands, that our familiarity within that sacred union—at least mine with Him–has come not as a product of any methodology at all, but rather through His continual and persistent engagement with me, as over many years He’s invited me repeatedly to come and see, and I have gone out along the pilgrim road to behold Him.
It takes a lifetime, really, of just walking where He’s walking and catching sight of Him, of just being with Him, and in the course of time, I am changed by knowing Him.
Today, as our Eastern European neighbor—one day soon, I’ll stop and ask her name— catches sight of Kevin and me going by on the run, she smiles widely, broad joy blooming on her history-written face. She raises an arm into the air, waving madly, still clutching her head scarf with the other hand, squeezed within the fist of which I see, predictably, the edges of a tissue.
“Hello, hello! Good day!” She calls, suddenly coming to life, and we call back, you too, you too, returning the blessing.
A block or so further on, Kevin says something between breaths—“wow, that’s really changed”—without needing at all to explain what he means, that he’s thinking back.
We remember, how over so very many days and months and years of passing and seeing each other, of making our awkward albeit warm invitations, eventually our neighbor began, however tentatively, to smile, then to call out soft hellos, sometimes to laugh or offer us an easy wave.
We remember, because of our shock, the day when, as we passed her while recovering from a sprint, she gestured toward Kevin a short distance ahead, urging me in kind but clipped syllables, “Come on, go go! You can still catch him,” her laughter carrying us on down the street.
All this has taken so much sweet time repeatedly encountering each other, us and our sweet Eastern European neighbor, but one day–now we feel sure–we’ll know her name and she’ll know ours, and maybe we’ll even share our stories. We really don’t mind if it takes an age—this we agree on, Kevin and me, keeping the smile–because we’ve got time enough, and in the meantime, we’ll all just keep showing up out here on the street.
