we can do this

Up the hill and around the curve, our nonpartisan feet beat out a unified rhythm, our graying hair slipping out of knots and flying free of caps, my friends and I speaking of how, during the viciousness of election season, the rotten, tongue-flung mud has splattered us all.  Guiding one another by the direction of our own feet, our fingers lightly touching elbows and backs, around shallow rain pools that could, for their darkness, be bottomless pits, where Autumn leaves float like soggy cereal across an upside-down reflection of the sky, we talk about how the ugliness of recent days has splattered like specks of spittle, breaching our carefully sheltered spaces and infecting everything, tearing us down and dragging us away from each other.

We might as well be writing another chapter in one of the World War II novels our book club reads every year, those stories reminding us of the potential for human brutality, except that we wield words as weapons these days, starve of affection more often than food, and for this reason, tend to minimize the warfare at work against us.  We have a difficult time assessing intangible enemies.  We like opponents to have faces, even though the apostle Paul, in his discourse on spiritual warfare sent to the military minds in the Ephesian church, said it isn’t so, said our battle really isn’t against flesh and blood.  So, we photo shop our fear with public personas and raise our fists in confusing directions.  Otherwise, we might come together and fight against dehumanization on every side.  Otherwise, we might confess, praying for our land, that we might be healed.  We might choose to climb fences and stand beside each other.

But anyway, our arms swing as we walk side by side through our neighborhood, free beneath a wide blue sky.  Our ponytails sway and lift; our eyes absorb the reds and oranges and golds adorning the trees, and it being election day and us always talking in some offhanded way about how to save the world, we friends comment on how ready everyone we know seems to be to set aside all the haranguing and get back to remembering what we have in common.  This unity we feel, as sisters more than friends, blankets us with an anchoring kind of peace.  These walks, they’re like weekly re-unions.

My watch buzzes with a notification, and I glance down.  It’s Riley, daily filling our family Wordle thread with her good jobs to absolutely every person who even tries to complete the puzzle.  In my mind, I hear her shiny laugh, sounding just a little sheepish because the notification has drawn my attention, hear her explaining as she often does that, it’s just me, Mom, encouraging everyone.

Encourage everyone.  I let the words twist and fall, the Spirit-wind making them dance in my mind, letting them remind me how God keeps inviting me, because He loves me, to a distinctly different life.  Encouraging everyone daily, on purpose, now that would be distinctly different.

A few weeks ago, a speaker at our church’s weekend worship gathering had encouraged us, in the context of our marriages specifically, to be the CEO, that is, he’d said, grinning, the Chief Encouragement Officer in the relationship.

“It’s corny, I know,” he laughed, “but you’ll remember it,” and I had, had even tweaked it a little in my mind—offeror instead of officer, had begun to pray about my intentionality in building—the language of scripture invokes an actual construction site–my husband and others, too, not just as a nice idea but as an intentional action, something I plan for and carry out on purpose, because it has gotten too easy, especially in this digital age, to substitute passive participation for concrete action.

I have been talking to God for a while, because He’s kind, listening to Him even more, about language that encourages, about Him wanting to tame my tongue so well that the things I say offer grace to those who listen, encouraging, or literally creating evidentiary advocacy for someone else, revealing to them how God weighs into the facts.

God has reminded me that scripture mentions a man named Joseph, though no one remembers him by that name, whom the apostles nicknamed Barnabas, meaning, “son of encouragement,” because Barnabas lived as a chief encouragement offeror among them.  Barnabas had been a bond builder, for it had been he who had first taken the transformed Paul to the apostles, telling them about how God had given this man who once murderously terrorized Christians a new life.

I smile now over my conjuring of Riley, watching my moving feet throw shadow across the winking asphalt, thinking that in fact, Riley is one of these also, a Barnabas, or, a chief encouragement offeror, and it’s not always about what she says, but rather who and how she is by nature.  She’s always building others up in her heart, and that just overflows, as Luke the gospel writer promised, in what she says to and about them.  Silently, I give thanks as I walk along, my ears still absorbed in the conversation, thinking about how she leaves other people, even those she’s only just met, better than they were before spending time with her.  In this quality of character, she reflects the master builder, the God who made her well, who loves us and by His grace gives us all eternal encouragement.  If only we could not let destructive voices, whether close at home or in government offices, grow louder in our cupped ears, worse, from our own mouths, than this truth.  If only we could use our words to stop malformation in each other.

“So, about our secret Santa,” one of us as-we-go-along friends finally interjects, because we have begun to sigh together over surveying the rubble, and we laugh in release, because the shift to the giving of gifts, and thus to the giving of love, that in itself a return to our natural inclination as imago dei, feels like a great relief.

“What if, without revealing anything about who we have, we just talk about each of our other friends and what might make good gifts for them?  We can help each other with ideas without giving away any secrets,” someone suggests.

We warm to the idea, pushing up our sleeves beneath the rustling trees and the maturing sun as we begin to name our mutual friends one by one, and it’s funny how the talk about what they might receive as love leads us to talk but about who they are, how grateful we are that one friend thoughtfully perceives a need and quietly meets it without wanting any recognition or attention; how another friend is so wildly, incredibly, variously gifted; how another friend excels at generous hospitality like no one else we know.  They’re not even with us, but together we have turned to building, like co-constructors raising a home, and so, we are being built together as found family, all of us becoming something stronger, sheltered over—literally, roofed—stego, in the Biblical Greek, by love and gratitude, compassion and kindness, respect and honor, by the kind of building materials that will outlast the world and survive even the refining fires of God.

I think of Adam yesterday, a sudden, fleeting reminder of him growing literally taller next to me, bouncing up on his toes, when at the end of a regular check up with his diabetes doctor, the receptionist checking us out decided to build even though she didn’t have to, telling Adam he’d done a good job with the appointment.  I don’t know whether she also loves someone with Autism, but she seemed to understand that these interactions require so much of him, and she beamed as she congratulated him on his efforts.  We can do this, I’d thought, beaming myself, my own heart full.  We can choose to build.  We can choose to encourage.

For his part, Adam had swelled and grinned wide, only gushing softly, “Oh, great job today,” as though receiving a rare jewel carefully placed in his open palms, as though regarding it with unguarded awe.

“You know, I think all these observations, not the gift ideas but these things we see in our friends, would make great notes sent out,” one of my friends says.  “Most of us have no idea about the good ways we impact each other, and we tend to be so hard on ourselves.”  We are nodding along, guided again around a bottomless pit in the road, as she decides out loud.  “Yes, I think I’m going to do that.”

Slowing, we reach the corner where our walking re-union always begins, where we ultimately drift away again toward our homes.  This same friend had at the end of our conversation about the ripping campaigns of what has felt to us all like an entirely too long season, commented that while we each can only cast one vote for our leaders and may otherwise mostly feel powerless about governance, what we can do is love the people around us more and better. Not just our friends, but everyone. Encourage everyone.  We can do that, she’d said, and I’d heard the powerful ring of truth, of action, of a decision to build.

So now, as we move away from each other and on to the day of small things, I carry with me the inspiration, like fingers still lightly touching my elbow, to do something big in the relationships I have with people around me, to be chiefly an encouragement offeror, that my words might bring healing and give God’s grace.  Because it’s time, I’d say, for us to turn again to building, and this is something all of us can do.