walk with me
“Building relationships seems so hard here,” my friend says, offering me a small smile as we walk down the glinting road, our foreheads glistening with early summer sweat. Sunglasses, the lenses gold and amber like a sunrise sky, cover up her eyes.
“That’s because we’re all so busy,” I say, and she laughs, an easy sound, lifted by the wind.
“But no,” she says, thinking of her big city roots, “we have so much more time here than we did before. There, we were busy.” She’s newly transplanted; this still feels slower and lighter than what she lived before.
I think of how fast everything feels–these streets, the days and all our hurrying–when I return from vacations at the beach, where waves softly beat out the rhythm of things and the day is marked by tides. I always wish I could bottle up that slower pace, preserve it somehow, bring it home with me and pour it out over time’s usual bullying. But now I wonder, does even the coast move more slowly if you live it all the time?
“I am learning that I have to be intentional,” I confess to my friend, thinking of the lists I keep lately, of newly deliberate attention to reaching out in love, of stretching time by investing it in people. As we talk, I think maybe it’s not the pace of time that changes but the quality of our experiences. “I am trying to put spending time with people ahead of my to do list.”
She doesn’t know me well enough yet to understand the faith that takes. For years, I have mishandled relationships while waiting for time enough, while thinking myself indulgent when I linger with friends. All I know now is that Jesus loves people with actions instead of only words, and I don’t look very much like him if I don’t do the same.
“Yes,” she says forcefully in the middle of my sentence, turning to look at me, punctuating agreement with her posture. We say “to do list” in unison. My new friend and I, we smile, we match pace as we cross the street.
These days, we live in a hyper-connected, painfully disconnected culture, hungry for community and nearly afraid of what it will mean to find it. Without a word, staring at the barefaced reflection of me in my friend’s sun-gold glasses, I give thanks for friends who have kept right on loving me through distant seasons of silence. Loving and being loved has been at the top of all my gratitude, but not always at the top of my priorities. Finally, I’m beginning to understand the greatest command.
My friend stops a moment just to cup a magnolia blossom in her hand, just to run one finger lightly along a smooth, carved petal. “Sometimes I drive slowly, just to look around and appreciate nature,” she says, then she chuckles. “No one seems to like that.”
Walking friends learn to walk together, I’m thinking, realizing that I might otherwise never have known this about her. The big city girl starved for trees slows down to take in the rich sight of a whole green stand. When my brothers and I were kids, we used to complain of nothing to see in our travels but those trees.
Standing beside her, I reach out now and run my own thumb down the curve of a silken petal. I’m smiling–that big, silly grin, because things do taste better when we’re hungry for them.
“You know,” my friend says, moving back to the walk, “we should do this more often.”
