Please be my people.
Almost every time, I leave their house feeling lighter than when I got there, even in my work clothes and work grime and work weariness. What was dormant in me is now stirring; what was dull is now reflecting bits of light as I walk back to my car on another Wednesday night. It's been two and a half months.
One week into my new city life, I was pressing send on an email to an unknown person. I was feeling around in the dark for an open table, for other hands that would reach back, for faces that weren't hiding behind plastic or paint or cliches. It was a hopeful search for the truest kind of community.
I think I've found it, but I'm not sure it's found me ... or that I've let myself be found by it.
There is laughter, connection, and contentment. And then there is tension. I don't mean a tension of opposing worldviews, of my grayness meeting a black-and-white environment and pursing its lips, but a tension in my body, in my very bones.
I feel it when we're sitting in quiet meditation and all I can think is don't breathe too loudly. I feel it when I'm saying something about prayer or solitude and my voice doesn't sound like my voice and there's an undercurrent of anxiety and maybe a flash of red on my face. I feel it when I don't know where to put my hands or where to stand, when I can't seem to join the conversation, when I don't know how to answer a question, when I'm coming in in the middle and I don't understand.
I'm no stranger to this sort of tension. When I was a teenager, I was like a light bulb. At home, my wattage was too high and I would start fires with my words and actions, but I was on. In the time it took to open the car door, say goodbye to my dad, and turn toward another day of high school, the light had turned itself off.
I've seen growth in the last 10 years, a smudging of that dark dividing line, a dance toward natural light.
But insecurities still pop up even in the safest of places, darkness still attaches itself to the light, and I'm still afraid of rejection and indifference and hands that won't reach back.
Please be my people is the unspoken desire, and my body tries to do and be and say everything it thinks it's supposed to do and be and say to make this a reality.
But maybe they already are.