Today I'm linking up with the Five Minute Friday community, writing for five minutes on a given prompt.
This week's word is HIDE.
image CBC.ca
The other day I went for a walk, and on my way home I met a woman walking a dog. I didn't realize until we got closer that it was a woman I knew from church: not a close friend, but someone I'd always found very easy to talk to and have had good conversations with.
She said with a big smile, "How are you?" and I said, "Well, to be honest..."
We stood there for about ten minutes, talking. I told her how tough it's been these past few months with Jonathan's seizures -- how he has gone from having 2 or 3 a year to having 15 in the past five months, and how he fell during a seizure at school this week and was taken to the emergency department by ambulance. He is fine, with no serious aftereffects of his fall, and his doctor is working with us trying to get the right combination of medication to control the seizures. But it's been very stressful.
So I told her all this. Then we segued into talking about what our kids were up to in general, church stuff, how we were handling Covid, etc.
When we parted ways, she said, "It's good to actually TALK to people, to tell them our s**t when they ask us how we're doing."
She's right. It's a real temptation to just hide our stress and anxiety behind a casual "I'm fine." To be honest, sometimes that's what the other person expects anyway; they meant "How are you" as a pleasantry and weren't expecting a full report. But in this case I took the chance because I knew this woman would be interested, and we had a really life-giving conversation.
Covid-19 has been isolating; following distancing protocols is appropriate, of course, but on a deeper level we can easily get in the habit of hiding in our homes and behind our masks. Taking the time to ask someone how they're really doing, and answering honestly when we're asked, takes some of that isolation away.
