Walking Clockwise

A month or two ago, I got to the park to walk a few laps around the rough circle of a walkway that goes over and along the creek and back over again. But soon after I began my walk, I discovered that while I was walking clockwise around the circle, the other four or five people on the path were walking counterclockwise. I began to smile and wave every time I passed them and initially they all responded to this, but by the second or third time I passed each of them, they grew tired of responding and I began to feel slightly awkward that I was the only one walking clockwise around the circle and waving at all the people I kept passing. But I kept on for a few laps still that day. 

This morning when I got there, I did what I tend to do now when I get to that park, even though it feels a slightly silly thing to confess. I sat in my car for a minute or two to see which direction everyone else was walking around the circle. They are always walking counterclockwise. Pretty much always. All of them. I’m not sure where this trend started, but I feel like it’s a pretty official thing and now it’s what I do too when I walk at that park. 

I have wondered how many people have had this experience and have sometimes wondered whether it would be beneficial to mark a sign explaining this to everyone out of courtesy, but that can seem rather silly too. Perhaps there may be some people who would not be bothered at all by walking clockwise around the walk while everyone else is walking counterclockwise, though I have not seen those people yet. 

I have also wondered how long it takes each person to figure out that this is what we do here. Do some people just understand this without giving it that much thought? I have no idea.   

And as silly as it feels to talk about it in this many words, I feel like this is pretty normal and harmless: to make this little decision to walk counterclockwise around the circle because that’s what everyone else is doing. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve decided that I really enjoy this little practice. 

Human the Same Way

There is something sweet to me about it for a very specific reason. For no matter who you are in this world, if you want to do the best you know to be someone who holds true to your values and to who God made you to be, there are plenty enough ways you have to be different from the people around you. And in the understanding of that, there is a sweet grace to be felt in the shared humanity of the things about us that are similar and the things we can do the same way. 

When I walk around that circle the same way that everyone else is walking I find comfort in knowing that each of us walking this circle may have very different beliefs and viewpoints, we may express faith differently or vote differently, but here in this little stretch of time we are all walking the same direction around the same circle all being human together right here in the same way. And there is something about that that feels simply and utterly beautiful to the soul.

Here, while we’re walking this circle, it doesn’t matter what is different about us. We all live in bodies that are made from dust and will return to dust and all of these bodies we live in share a common need to move with this body, to move with this life. And when there is a little space of time, a little way, where we are all moving in the same kind of direction, I think maybe it can feel a little bit glorious. 

And in the places where we must decide to walk differently from those around us, there is often much beauty there for sure, yet I think it’s true that there is a very real ache in there too that can feel a kind of grounding in the places where we are actually alike. 

When Love Calls a Different Way

I wonder what this calls to mind for you. Because, perhaps for all of us, there are places where you can mostly expect that you will be different from the people around you, and then there are places where you don’t expect the differences until you see them and something about that can simply be the hardest to try to process sometimes. 

When I think of it, I remember a moment when I felt the sudden ache of difference that I wasn’t sure how to process or how to step on from. I’ve wanted to write more about that moment for years and I still am not sure how to share about it in the best way, but I can try. 

It was one of the biggest moments that stopped me with a kind of ache inside, when I realized that many of the people around me in the place that felt like my safe place, were walking one way and I had a need to decide to walk a different way. 

It happened at a time when I had fallen in love with my now-husband, Luiz, and I am not good at remembering the timing of things. But it was either soon before or soon after our wedding and the birth of our oldest girl who was born during our first year of marriage. 

I was standing in a hallway surrounded by people I had known and been encouraged by for years, when a woman who my family had known a long while said to me that immigrants were the ones who caused all the problems in this country. And when she said it, I froze. 

I froze with a gut that wanted to burst with the ache, anger and grievance of a thousand things because I realized that the people she was talking about were no different than my husband who I was in love with and whose children I would bear and mother. Part of me wanted to fight her and part of me wanted to run away, and part of me had no idea what to do and I simply froze while my blood felt like it wanted to boil over. In that moment I felt sick to my stomach and I realized with pain that I had heard these kinds of ideas from people much of my life and had always with complicity gone along and even shared in it, while these ideas continued to flow.

I remembered years worth of comments like I was waking up for the first time to what was actually said, comments about not wanting them in our country, about how we don’t want their ideas here, and I remembered the comments about how racism was a problem of the past that we don’t struggle with here anymore. And what I felt with a rushing wave that day, was that I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand it for my husband. I couldn’t stand it for my children. None of this would do. And my insides boiled with anger and helplessness for all of these moments when I could’ve seen the direction we were going and I could’ve done something different, something... but those moments were behind me now and I felt sick, ashamed and frozen in the moment of trying to process and understand the implications of all of it. 

In the wake of her words, heard in that place of my life, I couldn’t bring myself to speak a word and as soon as I could manage, I made my way to the ladies room to stand bent over, feeling sick and to cry. I had a need to walk a different way and I didn’t know what that looked like. All I knew to do was to stumble through one step at a time. That one step at a time has, over the years, led to a myriad of ways in which I’ve decided to do something different than what may have been expected by some of the people around me. And I don’t know what I’m doing, and sometimes it feels really messy. 

I imagine that even if your story is completely different, that you have ways in which you relate to this, and to the moments in which you realized that you must walk a different way from people around you. 

Maybe, whatever the situation is and whatever it is about, maybe we all have moments when we see that we have a need to decide to walk a different way than many of the people around us even if they’re people that we love and who may not understand what we’re doing. Maybe all of us are kinda stumbling through.

Walking Different

Maybe none of us actually know what we’re doing when we desperately know that we hate a thing and do not want to live complicit with it at all, but also know that we Love (and want to continue to Love) people who may not see it the same way. Maybe yet, in situations like that, there are places where we can all agree that it looks like the fullness of all that Love is, as Love was most made to be. 

If that kind of Love is what we must do, then perhaps we can say that we don’t know what we’re doing. Or how to perfectly hate a behavior while also perfectly Loving the person. 

Maybe though, we know who it looks like and can put a face to it in a way... 

And even when we can’t fully understand why an innocent man would look at the people unjustly killing him, and plead with his Father to “forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” (Luke 23:34) even when we hear those words spoken from the cross and part of something inside us wants to immediately balance them out with talk about justice, what is true is that in that moment on the cross, Jesus spoke those words of forgiveness and He let them sit just as they were, while He received the outworking of God’s justice Himself. 

And there are places inside where we will always struggle to remember that and to understand how a statement like the forgiveness that Jesus spoke from the cross even belongs in a world where we don’t want to idly make allowance for all that is wrong. Yet, there are also places inside us that can remember the pieces of our own life and feel the weight of how much we long for and need to hear that kind of compassion spoken over us, individually. 

What we know is that Jesus’ heart of compassion for the people who were involved in the crucifixion that day, is no different than His heart for us in our offenses. 

As much as we need accountability, we all long, somewhere inside, for the compassion of someone who remembers that we are merely dust, not God, and if there is any hope for us at all, we deeply need super doses of compassion for the ways we show the dust that we are. (Psalm 103:13-14)

Because what’s true is that not a single one of us really does know what we’re doing with this life. We are like sheep who need a Shepherd. It’s a thing we all have in common, our shared humanity. The compassion in Jesus’ statement of forgiveness spoken from the cross is pure and just, not skipping over accountability at all, because the sweetness of it is only something we can hear and openly feel and receive when we are remembering how much all of it is true: that we truly don’t know what we’re doing with this life and we desperately need to fall on all of His compassion to get us through. 

As soon as we start thinking we know exactly what we’re doing thank you very much, we lose something precious. We lose our ability to hear and feel all of the sweet beauty of Jesus’ compassion spoken in those words from the cross. 

We need His compassion. And as much as we don’t know what we’re doing, with His compassion, we have what we need to do what we can. And we can look at Jesus and live into Love the best ways we know how… even when we do it differently from each other. It all looks like stumbles. All of it. And when we are trusting in Jesus’ forgiveness… surely we’ll act like stumbling people who know that we are stumbling people. Surely, we’ll act like people who do the best we know to own and face our stumbles, to learn from them, knowing that we’re not alone. Surely, if we are trusting in a forgiveness that we all need like this, forgiveness that is available to anyone who knows that they need it, surely we’ll live in continuing repentance that stumbles toward Jesus and toward graciousness with each other, knowing that all of us have this same need. 

And in the places where we start acting like a stumbling person who is forgetting that we are a stumbling person, surely we are forgetting one of the most important things that makes us alike. We all share the same exact humanity that comes with the very same basic and desperate need. 

Without this, we miss the whole Gospel Good News of His perfect Love and the beauty of what it means for our daily lives.

The Sweetness of  What We Share Still  

Maybe there is a reason that something about walking around the circle the same way as my neighbors can feel spiritually grounding. Like how singing worship in side by side respect, with people who vote differently than me, can feel like a spiritually grounding place that I need and love to get to be part of. 

And when I think about it, it’s a beauty I can also feel when I sit in a lawn chair on the grass watching fireworks with thousands of people who are different from me, but we’re all doing it together. And I can feel it when I’m sitting in the school pickup line with dozens of other parents waiting to hear the stories about what happened at school today, but we’re all doing this same part of life, waiting together in line in these commonday familiar moments. And I can feel it now while I sit in the coffee shop with dozens of other people while I finish this blog post, all of us with our common draw to a place that provides air conditioning, community and something fun to drink on a hot summer day.   
And now, when I walk the same direction as my neighbors at the park, what I aim to celebrate with my steps is our common humanity, our shared likeness, and our common need. The One who made us, who is faithful to remember that we are dust, all of us like sheep, and we need a God who knows and feels with us the tension and the strain of what it is like… to be human.   

(References and for further study: Lk 23:34, Gen. 3:17-19, Ps. 103:6-18, Mt 9:36-38, Isaiah 53:6, Psalm 23, Hebrews 2:17-3:6)