The QUEST for QUIET

One of the joys of my job as a grocery store cashier is the chance to chat with my customers all day long. Encouraged by store management to engage our customers in conversation, the point is to make their shopping experience more enjoyable; to establish a personal connection with people that brings them back. A people person at heart, I absolutely love this aspect of my employment, and resist job opportunities that would take me away from that customer contact on the front end of the grocery store.

That being said, after a few hundred individual customer conversations throughout the course of the day, when my shift is over, I am done. My needs at that point can be summarized in one two-word sentence: Quiet, please.

It’s caused a few problems for me lately, because my people contact doesn’t end when I clock out of my shift and then walk out the grocery store doors. Most evenings I have church-related gatherings to attend, either a mid-week service, a home Bible-study group meeting, or a training class of one type or another. While I enjoy them all, my ability to sit and listen to people talk, even after a break for a quick meal and a cup of coffee, is very limited. I After about 90 minutes at the most I simply have to get up and leave the continuing conversation and head for home.

People would probably understand my preference for limited communication at library-level volume if I took the time to explain it to them, and to the ones who have asked, I have done so. But the majority just look at me with raised eyebrows and questioning glances when I rise and run, surely thinking that I have a limited supply of patience, passion, or hunger for more of God. It’s even become a joke between a couple of us; when my ninety-minute deadline approaches, one friend in particular looks at first his watch and then at me, laughter on his lips as he whispers to me that surely it is time for me to go! While  I struggle sometimes with arriving places on time, when it comes to the moment of departure, I’m rarely late!

Thankfully, God understands. I love the fact that He speaks to me in a still, small voice, often using visual clues that speak soundlessly to a connection we have about a topic. His ability to communicate in ways other than verbally is one of the attractions of our continued relationship; it excites me to see how He’s going to deliver a message to me each day and entices me to come back repeatedly for more. With all of creation at His beck and call to do His talking for Him, He uses it in ways that astound and amaze me.

It seems that my quest for quiet ends each day with the setting of the sun. I rise the next morning, ready and eager to relate to people again, especially God’s Son!

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge…Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”
(Psalm 19:1-2,4) NIV)

A LETTER a Day

The title above is strangely appropriate to the forum in which this post finds itself, stuck right in the middle of the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge in which we bloggers post daily on our pages on a subject beginning with successive letters of the alphabet; a letter a day, except for Sunday, the day of most-welcome rest. Equally surprising is the fact that it was this challenge which led me to another that has similarly intrigued me, that of writing a snail mail letter a day.

 Jenny is a fellow A-to-Z-er whose The Modest Peacock blog (www.themodestpeacock.blogspot.com) celebrates handwritten missives in a big way. Her site led me to the story of Randy Osborne (www.randyosborne.com), who has taken on the daunting task of writing a letter a day in the year 2013 to anybody who wants one. Should I survive this year’s A to Z Challenge, I’ve mentally signed on to undertaking the A Month of Letters challenge in February of next year, writing letters that stamps are affixed to instead of posted on a webpage.

I am a huge fan of snail mail. Long before I owned a computer I wrote personal letters in abundance, usually to family and friends, but occasionally to church members who needed encouragement, authors I admired, or anyone else who caught my interest for a brief moment of time and had an address I could write on an envelope. As life got busier and the electronic world made communication easier I largely gave up the practice, as it simply took up too much time.

Perhaps it was when my sons moved away from home that my interest in the subject returned. I simply missed chatting with them, and doing so by mail allowed me to satisfy that urge in greater volume than I can text with my thumbs, one-sided conversations they could read and respond to whenever they had the time.

I come by the letter-writing bug honestly, as both my parents took pen in hand on a regular basis. My mother largely communicated with people at Christmas, handwriting long letters in the cards she sent to distant friends. My dad, however, wrote weekly letters to his children who had moved away from home. Just the sight of his familiar handwriting in my mailbox was as comforting as the words I read inside that detailed his day-to-day life or his thoughts on some subject I’d mentioned to him recently. Upon his death years ago I gathered up those treasures of his that I still had on hand and put them into a notebook. How wonderful it was when my now-grown youngest son started asking questions about the grandfather he never knew that I could pull out that volume and share written insights with him into the mind and heart of this wonderful man. He told me later that the letters my dad had written me were evidence of  how much he loved me.

We each have such a volume of letters filled with wisdom and instruction from a Father who loves us, penned in the pages of our Bibles. If we would only realize it as such we would look at it differently, open its pages as eagerly in the mornings as we rip open an envelope we find addressed to us in our mailbox and read what’s inside…simply a letter a day.

“For the Father Himself [tenderly] loves you…”
(John 16:27 AMP)

Be BRIEF

I’m blabby, gabby, a gabster. I use too many words on a regular basis, be it in my blogging, my writing for publication, or my conversation.

One of the challenges of the A to Z Blogging Challenge is simply to be BRIEF, to get a message across without using up too much of a reader’s time, especially during this month when we are all not only concerned with our own posts, but with reading as many of our fellow bloggers’ writings as possible. I set myself a word count that I’m to stick to no matter what.

It’s hard for me to cut my own words from a piece, to chop them off like the ends of a zucchini or peel them away like the outer wrappings of an onion to get to the more potent points inside. But once they’re gone I rarely miss them, and find my writing is better in its more concise form.

It’s a lesson I need to learn in life, as well. Burned into my brain is the memory of the day I went grocery shopping and spent a good deal of time talking to the cashier, a friend of mine, as she processed the contents of my shopping cart. She told me later that when I finally left the line, the man behind me said, “Wow, that lady can talk! I married a woman like that once. Glad I got rid of her.”

I was horrified..mortified…and made to really consider the way I communicate. Many is the time I’ve sent even a wordy text message on my cell phone, and wished later that I’d sent just a simple sentence instead that would have had more impact in its brevity than my longer missive.

Thankfully most of our written words can be edited. Not so with our conversation. Once it comes out of the mouth it’s spoken and can’t be taken back. Even the “send” button on the message app on my cell phone has caused my stomach to clench more times than I’d like after I’ve pushed it and then wished I could take my message back.

How funny that my communication in all its forms resembles the packages of men and women’s underwear I’ve seen on the store shelves. I’m going to leave the long johns behind me and go for the “briefs”: they cover the essentials without a lot of extra material to get in the way of things.

Be BRIEF.

“Listen, for I have worthy things to say…”
(Proverbs 8:6 NIV)