Last night I went out with my coworker (I actually hate that term. Makes it sound like I don’t really like her — we’re not friends — when we most certainly are.). We’d planned to go to one of our favorite pubs: dark, cozy, inexpensive, towny, the kind of place that doesn’t demand anything from you. It was closed, of course, and we had to run back to my car through the rain, cursing our lack of planning and horrible luck.
We headed to another small town to see if we could get in to a restaurant I knew, but just before we opened the door we saw the sign “Must have valid State I.D.” and we had to turn around with our heads hanging. K. is from out-of-state, and so again, we were thwarted.
Finally we ended up at a place neither of us had been. It didn’t have quite the same ease of the other pub, and it was terribly and perfectly suited to our passionate conversations of faith: what it means that Eve was created last and how wrong it seems to us that this is used to crown her as the “best of creation,” and how do we reconcile the fact that the Bible is inspired and yet heavily influenced by human culture and society? When I get out of work, I feel this release, like I MUST TALK ABOUT EVERYTHING NOW. The Bruins game was on the five surrounding televisions, grown men yelling at the score, their graphic t-shirts stretched tight across their stomachs, and we sat at the corner of the bar, two suspiciously uninterested young women who seemed, probably, a little crazy.
I realized I’ve stopped caring what people think. Okay, that’s not entirely true. Or even most of the way true. But last night, I didn’t care that we didn’t fit in with the sports crowd. I didn’t care that we were talking about God and relationships and Calvinism and what it means to have a marriage that points to Christ. A year or two ago, I would’ve tried to keep my voice down. I would have made sure no one could hear how much I care about these things.
Now, I wasn’t up on the table screaming.
But I didn’t feel shame, either.
I feel more energized after talks like that than I do when I wake up in the morning.
I feel more ready to be excited about life.
This photo has absolutely nothing to do with my post, but I CAN’T WAIT FOR STRAWBERRIES.