0310338824 (N) by Preston Yancey

Author:Preston Yancey [Yancey, Preston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2014-07-31T21:00:00+00:00

Six

CONVERSION

SAM AND I MET for coffee at Common Grounds somewhere in early Epiphany 2010.

We talked for hours. We began talking about the Great Texts program but were quickly derailed. Sam was not who I presumed he was. I was not wrong to think him intelligent or athletic, and he did have a brief stint in a fraternity, but I had misunderstood the kindness that processed in front of him. I had confronted it like a challenge, with my emptiness and uncertainty in myself — to face a reflection of what I thought I had been once able to give others unnerved me.

I need to admit, here, the thing I have of yet to speak, but maybe you’ve picked up on it. What happened with Avery turned me cruel, at least at times. There was a sharpness to my words. Not completely, not to the point that I had become totally hardened, but enough that the edge to me, a desire to cut before I was ever cut again, fought hard against love that was too pure, too self-giving. If I look back on the points of the plot of life up to that particular moment in time, I used to have that kind of love, but I lost it somewhere in the disillusionment.

But Sam is not kind the way most people are kind. He is kind like the world depends on it. Few things grieve him more than harming someone with his words, and he’ll drop everything to make it right. That sort of kindness, the kindness that will see the whole of you, felt like a memory. Even trying to write it down is proving a challenge, an almost-not-quite rendition of the events.

It was cold and we were sitting outside, bundled in jackets, drinking hot things in large Styrofoam cups, and because we were two people who cared a lot about the stories of others, we ended up talking for four hours about our lives, our faith, our girlfriends, our hopes and dreams and wonderings.

It was natural. Easy. Yet not. He asked why often. It was unsettling. I was so used to what.

I told him about Avery. Not everything, not quite. I told him vague things, then a few specific, fighting the want to tell him all of it — and why did I want to? So soon? Sam took it and held it, gave me the room to say just as much of it as I could, even though the saying was unpracticed and I was at times too generous and too flippant, too self-righteous and too self-abasing, but at the end he thanked me.

I was bewildered. Why would he thank me for that? He talked about trust, the trust it takes to share that kind of vulnerability. I blinked at him. Had I been vulnerable? I was numb to it, then. I didn’t feel how much I had given, how much I had poured out. I could see it, a bit, in his eyes, that I had given so much without realizing it.

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