safe people

Over the three days I was in Grand Rapids last week for the Festival of Faith and Writing, I stayed with cousins of my mom. For most of the time I was there, they weren’t. But they graciously gave me the code to their garage, the best guest room in the house, an invitation to help myself in the kitchen and the keys to their car. I saw them late Friday night, and on Saturday was treated to breakfast before I ran off to attend the last sessions of the conference. I had arranged to use their car until early afternoon on Saturday and was planning to fill it up with gas before I returned. When I got into the car that morning, however, the tank was full. My cousin had gone out early to fill up the car so I wouldn’t feel obliged to.

Over the past few months, I have been keenly aware of small, unexpected gifts—of people doing unreasonably kind things for me with no gain for themselves.

:: A new friend gave me a beautiful long sweater—easily the nicest, most attractive piece of clothing I own—the day before I started my job. She had bought it for herself but had never worn it and thought it would look great on me.

:: Another friend left a small arsenal of goodies outside my door the day I started work and a sweet, encouraging note, as she, also a mom of small children, knew how difficult the transition might be.

:: Another friend, who I rarely see anymore, contacted me to see if I would be going to the Bruce Cockburn concert at the festival last week. Although Bruce is one of my favorite performers, and my friend knows it, I didn’t think it would be wise to hand over the $25 for the ticket when we couldn’t even pay our taxes. When I responded no, my friend sent me a message that a ticket was waiting for me at the box office.

:: Yet another friend stopped me after church on Sunday to say that she and a fellow gardener had loads of perennials to split and she wondered not only if I’d like to have them but if I’d allow her to plant them for me. Just the day before I had told someone that one of my dreams would be to have someone help me figure out what to do with my completely unlandscaped front yard and plant it, which explains, I suspect, why I busted out crying on the spot.

I imagine I’m not alone when I say that I find it incredibly easy to identify the injustices in my life, the negative and the challenging. But lately I have been so overwhelmed by the good, the irrationally generous, that the things that plague me are slowly fading into the background.

On Saturday morning before leaving the festival, I sat in on interview with poet Li-Young Lee. After trying to explain some of the struggles he encountered when writing poetry—specifically how he found too much of himself in his poems when what he really wanted was to find God’s voice speaking through him—he got to talking about a community gardening project he had been part of and how, although it should have been otherwise, it wasn’t the uplifting experience he imagined it would be.

“We were trying to build community,” he said. “But the people who were part of it were not safe people to be around.”

He went on to explain that ego problems messed up something that should have been inherently good. It not only happens in writing that ego can get in the way of something that could be beautiful, it happens all the time in life.

And yet my recent experiences show that there are also things that happen in life that are so completely opposite, so purely lovely and life giving and selfless. Most often they are small and because we are so bogged down by the unsafe people and voices, we don’t even recognize them. But just like we know good writing when we read it—a narrator who can be trusted, an author who speaks truth—we should know good living when we encounter it. I have my eyes open now, even if they’re occasionally filled with tears, because I don’t want to miss the safe people, the people who show me that life, for all its troubles, is really something beautiful.

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If you haven't seen it, I wrote about something else I encountered at the Festival in Friday's TribLocal.