I prattle when I write...

"I'd show them the stars
And the meaning of life
They'd shut me away
But I'd be alright
Alright...

I'm just uptight..." -Radiohead

"...and I showed the clouds how to cover
up a clear, blue sky." -Johnny Cash

"I know we're all insane when there's no one else around.
I don't want to go outside. I would rather hide." -Joseph Arthur


Some people are just hard to love.
My naturally sunny disposition probably makes my above list a little longer than average. It also probably puts me on a lot of other peoples' lists.
But this weekend it was never more apparent how imperative it is that I love them anyway. There were three specific instances that reminded me, and it was funny how I reacted differently to all three.
I'll get specific on one: Saturday night in Kalamazoo, there was this ~10~ year old kid in front of us at the NOD. He was chatty and excitable to the point of being obnoxious. And boy, did he ever love me and Brian. At every opportunity, he would turn to describe, at length, the cars he liked and why he liked them. Or to interject in our conversation to inform us that slow and steady, in fact, does not win the race. Or to ask us if the onslaught of driving rain was, "getting us very wet?"
It was funny at first, bewildering at second, and by the time third rolled around, we were contemplating the trouble we would be in for stabbing him with our umbrella.
But cooler heads and little bit of Grace prevailed and I not only avoided infanticide, but ended up engaging the kid more and more. By the end of the night I found him almost tolerable. It just amazed me that God works completely counter-intuitively...by doing the one thing I didn't want to do, namely, talk to the kid more, I found him far easier to deal with and far easier to love.

The second and third involved people with no social wherewithall. Nothing gets on my nerves more than people who don't have a social speech censor. I suppose its partially because I spend way too much energy picking my words and my moments. What's funny is that my best efforts don't make me any more of a social firecracker than these people that bug me so much, they instead make me boring and standoffish. Whoops.
Anyway, at one point while in a social situation, one of said spectacularly unmuted persons was on a roll, really firing on all eye-roll-inspiring cylinders. I glanced over at a friend who gave me a wide-eyed white flag of disbelief. I was at my breaking point. In the past, I've been known at this point to say something really snide and cutting to shame the offender into silence, but again Grace intervened. I just burst out laughing. I put my head in my hands and laughed until it hurt. No one really understood why, but after that, I didn't find he/she so annoying, just amusing. And being able to put myself in their shoes, their social helplessness became kind of endearing. I even made some stupid jokes to help them out. And by the time I left, Grace really allowed me to LOVE them, not just put up with them. And that was an amazing feeling.

The third time was a similar situation, but reasons I won't get into made it a little harder just to laugh it off. I actually started off poorly. I got fed up and was my sarcastic and belittling self for a while. But at some point, again, God stepped in and I was able to grit my teeth, take some deep breaths and just let it go. There are some things you will never change about people, and getting upset about it certainly won't help me love them. And realizing that was the important part.

So basically all this is pointing towards is just some serious praise that God stepped in this weekend and gave me strength that I didn't have. And made me realize again that it's God's love that we use to love others, and without first being full of God's love, we will fail and fail again on our own. Kind of an obvious lesson, but I suppose we all need to be reminded of just difficult simple things can be.

PS. I find it fascinating, psychologically speaking, that some people start to prattle when they get insecure, because I react exactly the opposite way. So if you ignore them, they talk even more because you're making them more insecure! And then it follows that if you validate their prattling with a genuine response, it actually makes them calm down instead of prattling more. That just blows my mind! You're all WEIRDOS!! ALL OF YOU!!