Empty Gestures
1999: Invitation:
His gestures aren't empty at first.
The night of our high school graduation, when everyone else seems intimidated at the sight of me out on the dance floor in my wheelchair, he takes my hands and starts to dance with me. It's not a pity-dance. He is inventive and at ease - so much so, that when he leaves to dance with someone else, other people decide it's okay to dance with me, too.
Six months after we dance together, I am struggling with a lot. Anxiety, depression and Post Traumatic Stress after almost losing my twin sister Tara two years prior. I start writing a letter, and as an afterthought, I add his name at the top. I tell him about what I'm dealing with. Then he does something totally unexpected. He invites us to church with him.
The people are so friendly and they seem to genuinely care. When youth group officially starts, I am freaked out. All around me during worship, kids are crying and falling to their knees. His sister gets up to pray and she is crying and screaming and pounding the floor. My church experience is limited to a year at a Methodist church when I was nine. This is nothing like that. But, he is attentive and encourages us to ask questions. He is a gentleman.
He is my best friend.
2000: Inclusion
We are on a camping trip right now. It's me, Tara and a bunch of girls from church. The trip is fun, but I am looking forward to when he arrives. We are going to drive out to a lake. There is talk of cliff-jumping.
We arrive at the lake, and it hits me suddenly how much I won't be able to do. Normally, I don't care, but times like this, when it's obvious, I hate to stick out. And I hate to not be able to enjoy the fun stuff everyone else is doing, like jumping off that floating dock.
All of a sudden he is here. He tells me to get on his back. He'll swim with me out to the dock. Once we're on it, people start jumping off it.
"Oh, sweet! That looks like fun! Tonia, do you want to?" he asks, squinting at me in the bright sun.
"No! What do you mean? How?"
"You just hang onto my back like before, and I'll jump off."
Somehow, we go from that, to him standing on the edge of the dock with me hanging onto his back. He is almost ready to jump, when another thought occurs to him.
"When we hit the water, you have to let go of me, okay?"
My heart clutches in my chest. "No! I can't swim!"
"Tonia, you have to let go of me or else we'll both sink. I won't let anything happen to you. All the girls are down there to help, too. We'll get you, okay? Trust me. You just have to let go."
"Okay," I say warily, and close my eyes as he jumps.
2003: Offer:
"So, you girls should totally come to this conference after Christmas this year. It's amazing! There are all these worship leaders and speakers. What do you think?"
It's hard to believe that we are still friends, but we are. A lot has changed. He has gone to University in another state, and we've gone to a State school an hour away. When we are together, we still enjoy riding to church together squished together in the front seat of his Toyota. We bleat at the sheep that are in the field and we sing at the top of our lungs. When we go shopping together, he offers to carry Tara's purse and ends up asking the lady behind a desk in the mall, "Do you like my bag?" We sit in coffee shops and talk for hours about life, church, anything that matters. He has gone to India on a mission trip, and we have endured numerous family crises.
Still, our friendship is strong.
He brought up that conference months before it actually happened, and in the meantime, we have gotten a job, taking care of foster children of a family friend. They need us from Christmas Day through New Years. We agree, because the kids have grown to mean so much to us.
When he finds out what we decided to do, he is upset, asking, "What about the conference?"
We tell him these kids come first. That they have to.
Soon, he has the perfect solution: "I'll watch them," he offers. "That way you can still go!"
But it doesn't work that way. These aren't ordinary kids. So, we decline to take his offer, even though he means well.
2006: Healing:
By now, I have gone to that conference. It wasn't a great experience, and I've unfortunately grown used to people in my own congregation and others I visit wanting to pray for my physical healing. After a bad experience at a Healing & Deliverance Conference five years ago, I am wary of prayer for healing, and I've grown to dislike the feeling that I have something about me that someone else needs to fix.
Things at church are getting a little strange. There is talk of a revival at the Sunday services, and at our young adult Bible study, the majority of Tara's and my peers have voted to study the End Times (as in the book of Revelation, the end of the world) which this church believes in. They take the Bible literally.
By now, Tara has stopped coming, and I don't blame her. But for some reason, I still feel a pull to keep coming back. Even if it means sitting through this horrible video about propoganda and little children with guns, people being shot execution-style. I am horrified, and get up to leave and walk around outside. The anxiety the movie triggered reminds me too much of the anxiety I feel when I think about almost losing Tara. I find another friend out there and confide in her.
He comes out eventually and it's clear that we have to go. He is in a hurry. But my friend pulls him aside, and tells him a bit about what we were discussing. I don't like it, but before I know it, he's driving me home, asking me, "Don't you want healing?"
"It feels like, if I'm healed, I'm saying that nothing ever happened. Like nothing was ever lost," I say when what I really mean is that I'm not ready.
"That's a lie from the pit of hell!" he tells me, with so much intensity he's starting to put me on edge.
"Can't you just listen to me? I just need someone to understand what I'm saying," I try, feeling more and more like I am talking to a wall.
"No, I refuse to stand with you under the lies you're believing!" he exclaims.
And I snap, too. "I'm not asking you to stand with me under any lies! I'm just asking you to stand with me!"
"...Well, how long do I have to do that before you'll take the next step and get healing?"
A couple months later, I stop attending church, too.
2007: Wicked:
We start hanging out less and less. He's super-involved in the revival at church, but we have this one thing that Tara brought up months ago.
"Wouldn't it be fun if we all road-tripped out to Chicago to see Wicked?" she asked once, over pizza.
"Oh, right." I said, skepitical, because he would never agree to that.
"That'd be awesome! We should do it! I've never seen a musical before," he confides.
Well, that seals the deal, and one February morning after tickets are purchased for the show and a hotel room is paid for a night, he picks us up. We embark on what should have been a seven-hour drive, but ends up taking so long we are almost late, because of slippery roads. We have fun, though, singing along to the soundtrack and trying to teach him the words. For a while, it's almost like old times.
The Ford Theatre is gorgeous. We have front-row seats, and he is intrigued by the orchestra playing in the pit under the stage. We enjoy the show - sitting close enough that the monkies fly over the top of us. And at intermission, he creeps forward to check out what the orchestra's doing again.
Back at our hotel room (which is the temperature of an icebox, for reasons unknown to us) he picks up pizza for dinner, and then we take a few silly pictures. Then, we turn out the lights and try to sleep. By now, he is like our brother, so it's not weird to have him in one bed and Tara and myself in the other.
On the drive home the next day, he confides in us that he likes a girl. She is young, but it is no surprise to either of us. He asks if we think it's good fit, and I say yes. They are both interested in music and missions. We sing and talk, and before we know it, the trip is over.
2008: Lunch:
"Do you want to get together for lunch? How about Tuesday?"
We have determined that somewhere along the line, our friendship got weird. Tara and I confront him about it, and he agrees, saying it has been weird since we went to seperate colleges seven years before. We thought maybe for the past year or so, since we stopped going to church. But his revelation was jaw-dropping.
Since Chicago, we have seen even less of each other. He is really involved with the revival going on at church and with his girlfriend. When we do get together, the dynamic is forced. We're friends with both him and his girlfriend. He talks at length about his frustrations and we sit and listen, and offer advice. At the end of the meal, he finally asks how we are.
We answer briefly, and then it's time to go.
Outside our apartment, he stops short.
"Oh, I forgot to tell you this really cool thing that happened! Me and a couple of friends were hanging out, praying, the other night, and at first we were just going to go to Wal-Mart but then, we really felt like God was telling us to go to [the local] hospital. So we went there and we witnessed to the people in the waiting room."
His words are like a punch in the gut. Not only did he witness in an ER waiting room of a hospital, but it was the hospital Tara was taken ten years ago. My parents waited in a waiting room like that. For the rest of the day I am tense and irritable. The slow and very private healing that has taken place in me over the last several years, seems to be coming undone at the seams. That night, for the first time in years, I have nightmares. I start awake multiple times that night, checking to see if Tara is still in the bed across the room.
I feel taken advantage of, used and violated in a strange way. He knows that I deal with this. We've been friends for nearly a decade. I've told him that's the hospital she was brought to, so why would he do this and then tell me about it? I'm so mad, I send him an e-mail, telling him how I feel about his actions. I tell him that there is a time and a place for witnessing and evangelism, and if he knows someone there, that's one thing. But to go to a place where he knows no one, where the people are raw and scared and vulnerable like I was and like my parents were, that's when they need space and respect.
That, I think, is the beginning of the end. We have this epic email exchange where we just hash out everything that's been bothering us, but in the end it does little good, and he tells me that we should just enjoy each other's friendship as much and as freely as we can. That he doesn't see his other friends for months at a time and they are fine with it. So we should just be happy whenever he calls, texts or sends an email. He encourages me to call whenever I want, and if he doesn't want to talk to me, he'll just tell me.
We make plans to do lunch after that, but they start to fall through with no notice or explanation. The gesture is nice, but it is clear there's nothing behind it. And this starts to shine light on the fact that this is a pattern for him. To make plans and promises and not follow through on them. After a while, I just stop hoping, so I will stop being let down.
2009: Celebration:
He was never very good at remembering birthdays, so when Tara and I both receive emails wishing us a happy birthday and asking if we would like to go out to lunch with him to "celebrate our lives," we are surprised, to say the least. At this point, it has been at least six months, and we've heard nothing of consequence. Tara and I have come to the conclusion that our days of deep friendship with him are long gone. We decide to be casual friends, and, honestly, we know next to nothing about each other anymore.
So, I tell him, thanks, but we already have plans.
He writes again and I ignore it.
He texts, and finally Tara texts him back and tells him that honestly, we don't feel like hanging out, but thanks him for the message and says she hopes things were going well with him.
And he throws a fit. I am not kidding. It's 6 AM when Tara checks her email and starts exclaiming bits and pieces of his rant, asking if we saw him as "some sort of religious prick that cares only about himself?" It offends him to the core that we don't want to hang out with him. The rant is new, though, and startling. It's like no one has ever said no to him before.
And apparently, no one has. He writes the next day, apologizing for over-reacting. He still would like to hang out, but he will let us set the time and place.
We never set one.
Because it's clear that this gesture is as empty as our friendship for the last several years. It's for him that he wants to get together. It has nothing to do with us.
His gestures aren't empty at first.
The night of our high school graduation, when everyone else seems intimidated at the sight of me out on the dance floor in my wheelchair, he takes my hands and starts to dance with me. It's not a pity-dance. He is inventive and at ease - so much so, that when he leaves to dance with someone else, other people decide it's okay to dance with me, too.
Six months after we dance together, I am struggling with a lot. Anxiety, depression and Post Traumatic Stress after almost losing my twin sister Tara two years prior. I start writing a letter, and as an afterthought, I add his name at the top. I tell him about what I'm dealing with. Then he does something totally unexpected. He invites us to church with him.
The people are so friendly and they seem to genuinely care. When youth group officially starts, I am freaked out. All around me during worship, kids are crying and falling to their knees. His sister gets up to pray and she is crying and screaming and pounding the floor. My church experience is limited to a year at a Methodist church when I was nine. This is nothing like that. But, he is attentive and encourages us to ask questions. He is a gentleman.
He is my best friend.
2000: Inclusion
We are on a camping trip right now. It's me, Tara and a bunch of girls from church. The trip is fun, but I am looking forward to when he arrives. We are going to drive out to a lake. There is talk of cliff-jumping.
We arrive at the lake, and it hits me suddenly how much I won't be able to do. Normally, I don't care, but times like this, when it's obvious, I hate to stick out. And I hate to not be able to enjoy the fun stuff everyone else is doing, like jumping off that floating dock.
All of a sudden he is here. He tells me to get on his back. He'll swim with me out to the dock. Once we're on it, people start jumping off it.
"Oh, sweet! That looks like fun! Tonia, do you want to?" he asks, squinting at me in the bright sun.
"No! What do you mean? How?"
"You just hang onto my back like before, and I'll jump off."
Somehow, we go from that, to him standing on the edge of the dock with me hanging onto his back. He is almost ready to jump, when another thought occurs to him.
"When we hit the water, you have to let go of me, okay?"
My heart clutches in my chest. "No! I can't swim!"
"Tonia, you have to let go of me or else we'll both sink. I won't let anything happen to you. All the girls are down there to help, too. We'll get you, okay? Trust me. You just have to let go."
"Okay," I say warily, and close my eyes as he jumps.
2003: Offer:
"So, you girls should totally come to this conference after Christmas this year. It's amazing! There are all these worship leaders and speakers. What do you think?"
It's hard to believe that we are still friends, but we are. A lot has changed. He has gone to University in another state, and we've gone to a State school an hour away. When we are together, we still enjoy riding to church together squished together in the front seat of his Toyota. We bleat at the sheep that are in the field and we sing at the top of our lungs. When we go shopping together, he offers to carry Tara's purse and ends up asking the lady behind a desk in the mall, "Do you like my bag?" We sit in coffee shops and talk for hours about life, church, anything that matters. He has gone to India on a mission trip, and we have endured numerous family crises.
Still, our friendship is strong.
He brought up that conference months before it actually happened, and in the meantime, we have gotten a job, taking care of foster children of a family friend. They need us from Christmas Day through New Years. We agree, because the kids have grown to mean so much to us.
When he finds out what we decided to do, he is upset, asking, "What about the conference?"
We tell him these kids come first. That they have to.
Soon, he has the perfect solution: "I'll watch them," he offers. "That way you can still go!"
But it doesn't work that way. These aren't ordinary kids. So, we decline to take his offer, even though he means well.
2006: Healing:
By now, I have gone to that conference. It wasn't a great experience, and I've unfortunately grown used to people in my own congregation and others I visit wanting to pray for my physical healing. After a bad experience at a Healing & Deliverance Conference five years ago, I am wary of prayer for healing, and I've grown to dislike the feeling that I have something about me that someone else needs to fix.
Things at church are getting a little strange. There is talk of a revival at the Sunday services, and at our young adult Bible study, the majority of Tara's and my peers have voted to study the End Times (as in the book of Revelation, the end of the world) which this church believes in. They take the Bible literally.
By now, Tara has stopped coming, and I don't blame her. But for some reason, I still feel a pull to keep coming back. Even if it means sitting through this horrible video about propoganda and little children with guns, people being shot execution-style. I am horrified, and get up to leave and walk around outside. The anxiety the movie triggered reminds me too much of the anxiety I feel when I think about almost losing Tara. I find another friend out there and confide in her.
He comes out eventually and it's clear that we have to go. He is in a hurry. But my friend pulls him aside, and tells him a bit about what we were discussing. I don't like it, but before I know it, he's driving me home, asking me, "Don't you want healing?"
"It feels like, if I'm healed, I'm saying that nothing ever happened. Like nothing was ever lost," I say when what I really mean is that I'm not ready.
"That's a lie from the pit of hell!" he tells me, with so much intensity he's starting to put me on edge.
"Can't you just listen to me? I just need someone to understand what I'm saying," I try, feeling more and more like I am talking to a wall.
"No, I refuse to stand with you under the lies you're believing!" he exclaims.
And I snap, too. "I'm not asking you to stand with me under any lies! I'm just asking you to stand with me!"
"...Well, how long do I have to do that before you'll take the next step and get healing?"
A couple months later, I stop attending church, too.
2007: Wicked:
We start hanging out less and less. He's super-involved in the revival at church, but we have this one thing that Tara brought up months ago.
"Wouldn't it be fun if we all road-tripped out to Chicago to see Wicked?" she asked once, over pizza.
"Oh, right." I said, skepitical, because he would never agree to that.
"That'd be awesome! We should do it! I've never seen a musical before," he confides.
Well, that seals the deal, and one February morning after tickets are purchased for the show and a hotel room is paid for a night, he picks us up. We embark on what should have been a seven-hour drive, but ends up taking so long we are almost late, because of slippery roads. We have fun, though, singing along to the soundtrack and trying to teach him the words. For a while, it's almost like old times.
The Ford Theatre is gorgeous. We have front-row seats, and he is intrigued by the orchestra playing in the pit under the stage. We enjoy the show - sitting close enough that the monkies fly over the top of us. And at intermission, he creeps forward to check out what the orchestra's doing again.
Back at our hotel room (which is the temperature of an icebox, for reasons unknown to us) he picks up pizza for dinner, and then we take a few silly pictures. Then, we turn out the lights and try to sleep. By now, he is like our brother, so it's not weird to have him in one bed and Tara and myself in the other.
On the drive home the next day, he confides in us that he likes a girl. She is young, but it is no surprise to either of us. He asks if we think it's good fit, and I say yes. They are both interested in music and missions. We sing and talk, and before we know it, the trip is over.
2008: Lunch:
"Do you want to get together for lunch? How about Tuesday?"
We have determined that somewhere along the line, our friendship got weird. Tara and I confront him about it, and he agrees, saying it has been weird since we went to seperate colleges seven years before. We thought maybe for the past year or so, since we stopped going to church. But his revelation was jaw-dropping.
Since Chicago, we have seen even less of each other. He is really involved with the revival going on at church and with his girlfriend. When we do get together, the dynamic is forced. We're friends with both him and his girlfriend. He talks at length about his frustrations and we sit and listen, and offer advice. At the end of the meal, he finally asks how we are.
We answer briefly, and then it's time to go.
Outside our apartment, he stops short.
"Oh, I forgot to tell you this really cool thing that happened! Me and a couple of friends were hanging out, praying, the other night, and at first we were just going to go to Wal-Mart but then, we really felt like God was telling us to go to [the local] hospital. So we went there and we witnessed to the people in the waiting room."
His words are like a punch in the gut. Not only did he witness in an ER waiting room of a hospital, but it was the hospital Tara was taken ten years ago. My parents waited in a waiting room like that. For the rest of the day I am tense and irritable. The slow and very private healing that has taken place in me over the last several years, seems to be coming undone at the seams. That night, for the first time in years, I have nightmares. I start awake multiple times that night, checking to see if Tara is still in the bed across the room.
I feel taken advantage of, used and violated in a strange way. He knows that I deal with this. We've been friends for nearly a decade. I've told him that's the hospital she was brought to, so why would he do this and then tell me about it? I'm so mad, I send him an e-mail, telling him how I feel about his actions. I tell him that there is a time and a place for witnessing and evangelism, and if he knows someone there, that's one thing. But to go to a place where he knows no one, where the people are raw and scared and vulnerable like I was and like my parents were, that's when they need space and respect.
That, I think, is the beginning of the end. We have this epic email exchange where we just hash out everything that's been bothering us, but in the end it does little good, and he tells me that we should just enjoy each other's friendship as much and as freely as we can. That he doesn't see his other friends for months at a time and they are fine with it. So we should just be happy whenever he calls, texts or sends an email. He encourages me to call whenever I want, and if he doesn't want to talk to me, he'll just tell me.
We make plans to do lunch after that, but they start to fall through with no notice or explanation. The gesture is nice, but it is clear there's nothing behind it. And this starts to shine light on the fact that this is a pattern for him. To make plans and promises and not follow through on them. After a while, I just stop hoping, so I will stop being let down.
2009: Celebration:
He was never very good at remembering birthdays, so when Tara and I both receive emails wishing us a happy birthday and asking if we would like to go out to lunch with him to "celebrate our lives," we are surprised, to say the least. At this point, it has been at least six months, and we've heard nothing of consequence. Tara and I have come to the conclusion that our days of deep friendship with him are long gone. We decide to be casual friends, and, honestly, we know next to nothing about each other anymore.
So, I tell him, thanks, but we already have plans.
He writes again and I ignore it.
He texts, and finally Tara texts him back and tells him that honestly, we don't feel like hanging out, but thanks him for the message and says she hopes things were going well with him.
And he throws a fit. I am not kidding. It's 6 AM when Tara checks her email and starts exclaiming bits and pieces of his rant, asking if we saw him as "some sort of religious prick that cares only about himself?" It offends him to the core that we don't want to hang out with him. The rant is new, though, and startling. It's like no one has ever said no to him before.
And apparently, no one has. He writes the next day, apologizing for over-reacting. He still would like to hang out, but he will let us set the time and place.
We never set one.
Because it's clear that this gesture is as empty as our friendship for the last several years. It's for him that he wants to get together. It has nothing to do with us.