Questions and Answers

I just read about a mar­ried cou­ple with an inter­est­ing pat­tern of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. When one of them says, “I love you,” the oth­er doesn’t imme­di­ate­ly respond with “I love you, too.” Instead, the response is “Why?” or “What are your rea­sons?” It sounds a bit strange, but I get it. This breaks them out of the stan­dard for­mu­las to which we’re all prone.

Maybe it’s just easy for us to give our stock answers. Maybe ques­tions catch us off-guard, or per­haps we’d rather not get into it. Often I am so pro­grammed to reply to cus­tomer ser­vice prompts, like “Enjoy your meal,” with “You, too.”  We get asked, “How are you?” and our response is “Fine.” George Carlin would then respond, “No, hair is fine. Really, how are you?”

I think we go about a lot of our dai­ly liv­ing pos­ing — shar­ing only stock ques­tions and respons­es. Does this per­son real­ly — I mean, real­ly — want to know how my day has been? Do you have the actu­al time to hear how much I love you? Do we real­ly want that per­son to have a good day, or are we just being polite? Do I actu­al­ly want to hear it?

Now, tru­ly, we prob­a­bly don’t have time in our cal­en­dars at that very moment to get into the real and true aspects of our lives, feel­ings, and emo­tions when the ques­tions are posed, but I think we all need to respond to those queries at some time, in some fash­ion. Sometimes, we can sched­ule a few moments to chat with some­one about their day, or our feel­ings, or the hopes and dreams of the fam­i­ly, or busi­ness, or church.

We can take a few moments each day in prayer with God to mull over our ques­tions and respons­es. We can put things down on paper —  actu­al paper with an actu­al writ­ing imple­ment, or on the com­put­er, or record a video or audio file. Writing songs, com­pos­ing poems or sto­ries, draw­ing pic­tures, writ­ing jokes. These can be pub­lic, for spe­cial some­ones, or for no one else in the world but you and God.

But most­ly, our authen­tic selves show forth in our actions — how we treat crea­tures of the whole Creation, and our response to prob­lems, sit­u­a­tions, and events. When you put a sign in your yard pro­mot­ing jus­tice and peace. When you acknowl­edge the beg­gar on the street. When you safe­ly allow some­one in front of you in traf­fic. When you show up — just the sim­ple act of show­ing up when you’re needed.

Our response to the world and its flaws, pain, joys, and love can be as sim­ple or as elab­o­rate as we choose. Our stock answers don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean we’re not pay­ing atten­tion, or that we don’t care, but could be meant as place­hold­ers — moments for us to reflect and dis­cern how we are to live in this life, on this jour­ney, with God and with one another.