Run Girl Run

When I'm feeling stressed out or a little under the weather, updating this blog is always the perfect medicine. It provides me with a little laughter without using too much brain power (somehow, reading something funny is more difficult than typing out an odd encounter pulled straight from my daily life).

When I was in high school, my best friend Ginnie and I wo

uld make fun of this girl named______. I put a blank, not because I want to keep the girl anonymous, but because I do not actually know her name. We simply referred to her as Go Girl Go! Why? Because every time she went anywhere, she would duck her head, pump her arms, and walk like an 80-year-old woman running the 100-yard-dash. More recently, my memory has dubbed her Run Girl Run! But Go Girl Go still provokes more chuckles.

Our high school lunch room was actually a gymnasium....and our chapel and our auditorium. My sister's friend Emily affectionately referred to it as our "cafegymatorium"--a perfectly accurate description. No tables were set in the middle of the court for fear of damaging the

hardwood and affecting the play of the upcoming weekend's basketball game. Therefore, each side of the gym was lined with benched white tables flanked with hungry high schoolers--juniors and seniors on one side, freshman and sophomores on the other. As a freshman, you dreamed of the day you would graduate to the other side of the gym.

I believe Go Girl Go was a freshman when I was a senior. Perhaps she was younger and a class of 8th graders had managed to crash our lunch hour, thus annoying the heck out of us cool kids with their juvenile antics. Either way, I loved watching Go Girl Go rise from her seat and jet across the lunch room to retrieve her food from the concessions stand turned Taco Bell or Dominos or whatever fast food restaurant was playing caterer for the day--such is the life of a school on the impoverished end of the private school food chain.

"Look!" Ginnie would shout. "There's Go Girl Go!"

"HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!" we'd both laugh. "GO GIRL GO! GO GIRL GO!" Sounds more like a spoof on Dr. Sues than a term of endearment, but we really did love that Go Girl Go. She brought joy to our lives and laughter to the otherwise mundane lunch room conversation (that last phrase was there for effect and could be argued as inaccurate, even by myself).

I hadn't thought about Go Girl Go for several years until an interesting observation of my neighborhood UPS man. It was a Thursday morning and I had just gotten out of the shower after a long workout at the Columbia Athletics and Recreation Center. Still in a bathrobe and dabbing my dripping hair with a yellow towel, I heard the door bell ring.

Crap! I thought. And I scrambled to find some blue jeans lying somewhere on my floor.

Don't leave! don't leave!

I reached for a long sleeved t-shirt then stopped, paralyzed by what I should do next.

They're going to leave before I get there! What do I do? Look out the window!

I dropped the shirt, ran to my window, and peaked out just in time to see a bald headed man in brown darting across my front yard. He lept into the open side of his trusted truck and sped away.

Hehe....that was weird.

Puzzled, I looked out the window again to see if he was gone and re-imagined the scene I had just witnessed.

Why the heck did he just run away? Did he not want to talk to me?

Who knew that UPS men were professionally trained in ding-dong-ditching. I thought those days flew away with middle school dances and bad boy crushes. I guess I was wrong.

I went to the door to see what he had left and was surprised to find the package of envelopes and EFT forms I had ordered from the Campus Crusade staff store.

Oh good! I thought. Those got here fast.

But for some reason I couldn't get that guy out of my mind. Why in the world did he run away? I would guess he has a fear of talking to people he doesn't know. Instead of having an awkward conversation with a girl in a blue bath robe, he'd simply rather flee the scene and avoid any sort of human interaction. People are weird. People are isolated. And its that self-isolation that makes us fear what we do not know, and that thing is personal relationship.

Now I don't know what this guy's family life is like. He could be married, he could be divorced

, or he could be pulling a Matthew McCoonaughey--single and still living with his parents. Whatever the case my be, his sprint across my front yard reminded me of my own struggle (and quite possibly the struggle of many others) to connect with other people because we fear their judgement. And instead of taking risks, being ourselves, and experiencing something good, we run and hide in order to avoid the bad that most likely doesn't exist in the first place.

So, this is my call to all you readers and writers out there: stop running. Take the challenge to confront whatever people or persons or circumstances that might come your way. You might be shocked at what surprises life has for you!