We Can Do More Than We Do
Day 11
Buechner observes that when we ask each other “How are you?” we rarely want an honest answer. He tells two stories to acknowledge his own resistance to hearing the truth in people’s stories and then encourages us to do more to look, listen and love.
“So we are told to love. We are told to listen. We are told to look. But a lot of the time we don’t because we choose damn well not to, and because only a saint could do it all the time, I think. You have to choose who to listen to because if you listen to everybody and you look at everybody—seeing every face the way Rembrandt saw that woman’s face—how could you make it down half a city block? You couldn’t. If you listened to what everybody says to you, how could you survive a day? But we can do more than we do—more than we do, surely we could do that.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, p41.
To help you reflect…
Be awake to when you are choosing not to be attentive to the people you encounter today. What is the more you could do to love, to look, to listen? Don’t overthink or overcomplicate it - go with your initial, intuitive response and try to follow that inner knowing.
Last week as I came out of a Walgreens, a man was sitting on the ground and as is a normal occurrence today, asked me if I had any spare change. I replied with my most common response. “I don’t carry cash.” This was not untrue, but as I sat in my car contemplating what might have brought this man to be sitting outside this Walgreens with his head in his hand. As I weighed my response, I remembered that at some point I had put some change in an Altoid tin. As I sat there giving the Holy Spirit the quietness and opportunity to speak to my heart. In that moment, I knew that I was being urged to return to the man and hear his story for how and why he was in the situation he found himself in. As I looked in my glovebox for the tin with a small amount of change to give some to the man, I looked up to find that in my distraction and contemplation, the man was no longer sitting there on the sidewalk. I cannot even begin to express my dismay at having missed the opportunity to stop, look, listen, and just be a part of this man’s life.