A couple sits together in a restaurant, but they might as well be at totally different tables. He watches a college football game on the TV, she stares out at the people in the restaurant. No words spoken to each other. I watch them for close to an hour and no more than 10 words are said between them. Maybe it was an off day for them. Maybe they were having a bad day. I don't know what their situation was. I was just observing them at a restaurant in the airport. My thought though was how do you get to that point? How do you sit at a table with the person who should probably know you best and have nothing to say?
My next thought was how do I guard against that? How do I continue to communicate to Lisa how much I love her and the importance she has in my life? I don't think you wake up one day and you no longer have anything to say. You give it up little by little. You let the unimportant distract you from the important. You let your selfishness become the guiding factor instead of thinking of the other person. Really, we are all capable of being there. We have no problem focusing on ourselves, but seem to constantly struggle to place others in front of our own selfish wants.
I have no clue how that couple ended up there. All I know is that I don't want someone to one day be watching me sit at a table in a restaurant with my incredible wife and have nothing to say. (Unless it is because I am speechless because of how amazing she is.) How do you protect the important in your life? How do you keep from living your life based on your own selfishness? What's your plan?
1 comment:
"thoughts from an airport terminal"
Working title for your #2???
I wish I could speak from a position of experience from avoiding these pitfalls, but honestly my fear is that sometimes I could be in that couple. I know there are many things that account for how we get in the places we are, but when you're in them sometimes specifics are hard to see.
A few words/phrases that come to mind are, priorities, over committing in life, selfisness, tug o war living (over things like spare time, spare money, etc.), work schedules, church responsibilities, friendships, life stresses, very different personalities, add years to that and eventually you're sitting across from someone that you can't talk to much.
I don't have answers for that. I just know how it can happen.
I think it is a challenge when people are at different places spiritually, with different priorities. Sometimes you might have one person who's ready to roll into whatever it is that God wants to take the two of you, and the other is holding back, even fighting sometimes. Years of this can wear the two of them out, and leave the spiritually leaning one pretty hopeless and wondering, what's the point?
(all hypothetical of course).
I think there can be lulls in life that have a course or season that's somewhat natural, but silence can be sad and discouraging.
I suspect that something of the plan to get out of all that involves sacrificially living with the other in mind. Good things come from that I think. (back to the previous scenario- can be challenging however when the things sacrificed are things that would lead you closer to God than away).
Some things in life are complicated.
That's me for today.
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