Lying in Pairs

If you give someone long enough, everyone will surprise you.

I spent last night with my friend Allison from high school. She was spending her last night in DC (the tail end of her internship), and we ended up getting dinner and talking. She's always impressed me as that sort of person that has a good idea of what's going on in the world and has the capability of going along for the ride. And last night, we got to talk one on one for the first time in the history of our relationship.

And she surprised me.

I think the first step is to shed any concepts that you have about people. To suspend your disbelief. We walk into almost all of relationships with baggage, notions of how people treated us in the past, of how this person ought to be. In order to be surprised, you have to be open to it.

Sometimes I think that people that claim to be open minded just have a different opinion. I'm speaking specifically of the counter-culture I've encountered in my life, especially at Baylor. Hippies, vegans, anti-war, anti-Bush, atheists, agnostics, free spirits. Some of them had an incredible nature about them. But a lot seemed to think they were open-minded, when they were just as stubborn as everyone else. Having a different opinion does not make you open minded. This is why when I tell these types of friends that I spent my summer with a bunch of Christians discussing Jesus, they can't fathom it. They challenge themselves on everything except what would truly challenge them.

I feel like we are all this way about people. We love having them defined in our minds. We enjoy them up until the point when they might truly challenge us to rethink who they are. But when you give someone long enough, that moment comes that surprises you - something they have in common with you, or a way they think about something exactly opposite from your mindset. And it's a beautiful thing.

But like most beautiful things, we tend to forget how beautiful it is and focus only on how scary the cliff we have to jump off is. All great things come with challenges, but if we focus on the difficulty of the challenge, we probably won't ever get to take in the prize.

Here's to rethinking everyone we know.