She’s Hannah and she has a car

So it was one of the first months of COVID Quarantine and it was already taking it's toll on people. I missed seeing friends, and it was just getting tough. Everyone was zooming, calling, face-timing, whatever they could, but it wasn’t easy for anyone. 

My sweet friend Hannah is from Raleigh, lives in Nashville, but was working from Raleigh with COVID hit so she stayed there to try and ride it out. Needless to say everyone in Nashville missed her, including me!

So once a week we would call each other on our lunch breaks during covid and chat and talk a "walk" together. By our lunch break I mean her lunch break, ha. I worked in the entertainment industry so it shut down, so my talk with her was a very welcomed phone call each week.

My house has this huge hill as a front yard so when we would talk on the phone I would go out there and walk up and down that hill for the 30-60 minutes we’d be on the phone. It became our joke of me “walking the hill” while she was on the phone.

Anywho, one week we had our scheduled lunch call and she called me and said “are you on the hill?” and I said “yep I’m walking!” and she said “hold on, I’m walking outside of my house to go on a walk too.” And as she said that I see a car pull up my driveway and say “Oh nooo this always happens, someone always comes in my driveway while I’m walking up and down my yard like a crazy person…” ha we start laughing then I see who it is..”OH MY GOSH HANNAH…IS THAT YOU?!!”

She gets out of the car and of course we can’t hug (covid rules) but I ask her “what are you doing here?” and her answer was simple, “I came to walk the hill with you.”

So for the next 30 minutes we just walk and talk up and down that hill…together. That was the first time I had seen anyone besides my roommates for months. I don’t think anyone who didn’t go through Covid will ever understand what it was like to be isolated from your people. I needed to see her at that moment, she had a car, she had a way, she probably had a large bladder because you couldn’t use the public restrooms on that road trip. She just decided and said to herself “yeah, I’m going to drive and see my friend today, walk the hill with her.”

It wasn’t extravagantly planned out, but it was about knowing what someone needed at that very moment. Knowing it wasn't hard to make it happen, it was just a friend in her car coming to see if another friend was ok and to walk a hill with her.

that was her loving me with what she had. 

Be who you are, love with what you've got.

So it’s the summer of 2020, and if you’re reading this from the future, this was  the summer of COVID-19. I know the 19 in COVID-19 can throw you off, but this was actually in 2020 and this was the summer that life just got thrown upside down. The summer no one could see coming, and no one had a clear picture of how to get out of it. People had ideas on what to do, but we all kind of wiggled through it together.

I know it would be very easy for me to write about how hard it has been, maybe one of the hardest seasons in life thus far for many of us. Jobs lost, people getting ill, so much isolation, let alone the racial injustices that can't be ignored any longer. This has not been an easy season, it’s been a pretty tense and stressful trauma for everyone. I will write plenty on how hard this has been, I will not and have not been able to skim over all of the hard parts of these months. My family and closest friends have been there for me and me for them, to check in daily to make sure the day to day isn't getting us down.  

However, this little diddy of a blog entry isn’t about how hard it was, but it's about how I saw my friends and family in the little little moments, how they showed me such love and maybe didn’t even notice it.

I’m reading a book called “everybody always” and it’s a sequel to “love does” and both books are about a man named Bob Goff and his life and how he sees Jesus in random acts of love.  People RAVE about these books, and they are amazing, but I think there is a bigger picture here. Goff does live a pretty fun life with good stories, but I don’t think it’s anything out of the ordinary. Ok ok hold on….hear me out. I mean yes it’s amazing, but it’s not like he’s telling you a story about he solo’d  Kilimanjaro (def. had to look up how to spell that), or told you about his 5 gold metals.

He’s telling stories about how he gets a creative idea on how to love someone that is in his life and then he does it. How he thinks about toilet papering someone to make his neighbor laugh, then he just does it. And yes his life takes some pretty radical and amazing turns, but I think it’s mostly because he says yes to the daily life, and it opens more doors, gives him more ideas on how to be loving. He says yes to those little, but brilliant ways to love and before you know it he’s having a neighborhood parade. I love his books because it’s more about stories of just loving people however you can. Not coming up with these huge grande ideas, or planning for months, but just saying yes, going, letting them grow.

I also love that his books talk about heart ache and trials, and loss. As a  believer I think it’s important to tell those stories. For non believers, if all we talk about all the victories and they have loss, how can they relate? We need to share both, both will happen, God tells us good and bad will happen, expect both and be planted for both.

OK anyways, this is not about a Goff book review, this is about opening my eyes to see where others have just loved me. Where if I had to write a book right now, I could, because people just say yes to the day to day and it makes up my life. They show me love not by planning the most epic surprise ever, but just by loving me where I am, where they are, with what they have.

So the next few blog post are for me to remember the people who loved me right where I was ...in this hard time, with whatever they had. We weren't really allowed to hug, or go to restaurants or do the things we normally do. But these friends just showed up, with who they were and what they had and it turned out to be extraordinary.  We all have extraordinary lives waiting for us to see, Goff isn’t the only one that can live it. And Im sure I can speak for others when I say sometimes the exact thing we need in these hard times is to open our eyes to the little moments, the good moments, that the people in our lives, the 5-10 people you’ve been able to see these past months, those are the moments we need to capture.

Again, not minimizing that this has been a global trauma, I'm just trying to see little ways I’ve seen love over the past 4 months of quarantine.

Stay tuned party people...I'm going to do some reflecting and writing about my extraordinary life and the people who love me in it.