Face-to-Face

I have an address and a driver’s license in Pennsylvania, now.  Our house in Illinois is sold.  All of the boxes that I am going to unpack pre-remodel are done.  I’ve found a church, the grocery store I prefer, the Y for early a.m. workouts.  I really lack for nothing at this point.  Even Dave’s phone situation is better than we thought and we can talk almost daily (almost as regularly as Zac and Anne when he was in Iraq). 

What I miss is face-to-face conversation.  I talk to people all day long in my job.  Joel is here when I am at home.  I can talk to Dave, as well as our kids and Bunny and Tamara and Sharon and Sara and others on my phone.  But I have had almost no “let-me-get-to-know-you” conversations here.  I can count them….dinner with one of the men I work for and his wife right after I got here, a meeting with the pastor in his office, coffee with a woman on staff at the church who was responding to my offer to volunteer, one of my coaching appointments where the client (destined to become a friend, I think) asked me direct and interested questions about myself, a good connection with someone at a dinner party.  All this, in two months.

I am a willing and able participant in relationships.  I bring much to the table.  I am interested in learning and growing from hearing others’ journey experiences.  I love to have others learn and grow from knowing me.  I am a generous and kind (and, granted, opinionated) woman with much to offer.  Yet, no one seems to be interested in me as a new potential relationship.  This seems very strange to me. 

Dave and I have always been others-oriented.  Maybe that has, occasionally, held us back in our own personal lives and ambitions, but generously giving other people time and money and a place to be when they need it is a life style we have embraced.  We were trained in hospitality early in our marriage (I could give you lists of books and Bible studies and read to you from years of journals).  Now, I am shocked to find that I feel alone in my quest to know and add value to other people’s lives. 

I have not labeled myself as a <recovering> pastor’s wife here.  I do wonder if I did how things would change?  For some, one way- for others, another maybe.  I’m not interested in finding out.  I’m not hiding it and certainly not ashamed of it.  I told the one person who asked about my husband past “where is he?”  I am just simply interested in being a value to others because they find me to be engaging and encouraging, interested and interesting.  

Patience, I suppose.  People are busy.  People have friends and family already.  But we have been made, created, to be relational.  Not dependent, but interdependent, offering and receiving from one another.  Face-to-face with a bit of time invested.  As I wait for the connections here, I’ll stay thankful for the ease of cell phones and I will keep reading–right now, Steve Brown, John Maxwell, Ken Blanchard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Seth Godin, Elizabeth Eliot, a good novel now and then–to be sure I will be interesting and have something to contribute when the time comes.