waving at strangers.
Posted by nathan on 26 Mar 2007 | Tagged as: my life.
you know, a lot more people know who i am than who i know. About once a week or so, someone will wave at me. Sometimes I don’t have a clue who they are, so i just smile and wave back, pretending i know them.
I have found that being a pastor’s son at a church with well over a thousand different faces who consider this their church home, way more people ‘know’ me than i know them.. I remember several years ago talking with my friend Matt Keller, and he related, saying (i’m paraphrasing) yeah, it’s like everyone knows all about me, but i don’t have a clue who they are. i’m thinking, ‘i’ve never seen you before in my life!’
But anyway, i say that because yesterday, Emily and I were walking out of Home Depot, and i looked over and there were three Home Depot employees messing around with a generator. The one lady (with sunglasses on) looked up, smiles and happily waved at us. So, i waved back. Then one of the young guys (about age 20, i would guess) with her looked up, and he stood up straight, seemed VERY, VERY excited to see us, waved and yelled, ‘how are you’. Then i waved again, Emily waved, and then i looked the other way…There was a 20 year old girl walking out of the other door, and we were directly in the middle of their line of sight.
I wouldn’t have thought much about it, but the guy really looked intent on saying hello. He was happy to see us, i thought. But now that i think about it, he was just trying to impress that girl.
I wonder how many times we are considered about impressing someone that we forget about others. Sometimes i think we look past people to see what we want to see, while leaving the people in the middle trying to figure out what is going on.
BTW, my wife and I were sitting outside at Starbucks last night, and my friend David (a senior in high school) drove by, he waved at us, we waved back, but it made me smile, because between us and him were two high school girls about David’s age, who probably thought David was waving at them. I thought that was fitting…
1 Comment »
on 06 Apr 2007 at 1:02 am 1.
Billy Flood said …
Waving at Strangers is the name of our band! Cool.