I was looking through my notebook last night when I got home from giving my campaigners because it felt like it had been forever since I’d done that. Partly because we have had so many leaders, but mostly because I’ve had to go to class most Mondays for the last year, but the last time I was leading discussion was March 1st. Honestly it felt like it had been longer. I was nervous for the first time in years about the questions I was going to ask and the direction I was leading things. Afterward I asked my team about it, and with the exception of one “terrible” which I think was mostly in jest everyone thought it was ok. However it was for the people listening the material I shared has meant so much to me in the past and this summer especially.I have been reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” for a couple months now and it has been great, even overwhelming at times. For one thing she’s a 13 year old girl that’s not going to school during her time in hiding (from 13-15) and she’s a significantly better writer than I am, for that matter most people. She has a way of saying the things you can feel but can’t put into words. She can, and regularly does articulate the most complex feelings of life in simple easy to understand phrases and paragraphs. Last night at campaigners I used something she wrote in one of her first entries; about two weeks before her family went into hiding.
“I haven’t written for a few day, because I wanted first of all to think about my diary. It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I – nor for that matter anyone else – will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Still what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.
There is a saying that “paper is more patient than man”; it came back to me on one of my slightly melancholy days, while I sat chin in hand, feeling to bored and limp even to make up my mind whether to go out or stay at home. Yes, there is no doubt that paper is patient and as I don’t intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook, bearing the proud name of ‘diary,’ to anyone, unless I find a real friend, boy or girl, probably nobody cares.
And now I come to the root of the matter, the reason for my starting a diary: it is that I have no such real friend.
Let me put it more clearly, since no one will believe that a girl of thirteen feels herself quite alone in the world, nor is it so. I have darling parents and a sister of sixteen. I know about thirty people whom one might call friends – I have strings of boy friends, anxious to catch a glimpse of me and who, failing that, peep at me through mirrors in class. I have relations, aunts and uncles, who are darlings too, a good home, no – I don’t seem to lack anything. But it’s the same with all my friends, just fun and joking, nothing more. I can never bring myself to talk of anything outside the common round. We don’t seem to be able to get any closer, that is the root of the trouble.” ~ Anne Frank June 20, 1942
I have thought this summer about how many people feel exactly like that and are either not be able to understand that feeling or not be able to communicate it so well as this. I know I have felt that way at times in my life. The thing I wanted to communicate to my friends at campaigners was that as Christians we have an opportunity to be those friends with which people can bring out and share the things “buried deep” in their hearts. I mean yesterday I wanted to encourage some high school kids to be like that, but the feeling I’ve had thinking through her diary is that all of us should try to be more like that. It’s a well worn point that we were made to be in relationships, but for a variety of reasons it seems difficult to get past the “common round” with people and really share life. It just easier to talk about the 1st place Reds or watch a movie or participate in some activity where the focus is the thing you’re doing not the people you’re with.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with family the last few months, more than usual because my grandma has been in the hospital with a variety of health problems. Essentially she’s just old and her body is worn out. It looks like this week we’ll be moving her to a hospice facility. Honestly, I feel like most of the family has pretty well come to terms with things. I mean, she’s a faithful lady coming to the end of a good long life. I will say it is sad, not really because she’s dying, because for her it will be “far better to depart and be with Christ,” but because we will miss her. It hard now even- on the days when she’s not herself, seeing the shell of the person you love. It has been a hard season for the family, but for my relationships with them it has been good. At least one night a week now I’ll have dinner with my dad and my uncle sometimes too, and talk about how things are going for them. Conversation usually starts being related to their mom, but almost always moves to the rest of life (and then back to the Reds). The thing that kills me is watching some of my family struggle with my grandma’s situation because they believe this is the end of her life, that there is nothing coming next. No wonder their grief is so much more, no wonder the situation seems so much more desperate to them. I think all I can do is have compassion for them, and love them, and given the opportunity share the truth, but it is hard to watch.
One last thing I want to share; I was sitting with my dad a few nights ago on his back porch just hanging out and he reminded me that he wanted to borrow Band of Brothers from me. He said “It’s nice to have stuff like that around for a rainy day.” I told him given the opportunity I’d probably just sit on his back porch all day smelling the rain come down, watching things turn greener, listening to the drops of water falling off the edge of the gutter into the mulch. He said “I have…many days.” I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t envy him a little bit in that moment.
