Not the life of the party

I did fairly well at a party Friday night. I know it sounds strange to say that—to evaluate the outcome of a birthday party as a personal success or failure—but you introverts out there will understand.

It isn’t only introversion. Parties with lots of people are settings that apply various kinds of pressure on me. Fortunately (I should say fortunately as a Christian), these are all pressure situations that God is interested in orchestrating for my good. One of the things the Spirit who indwells in us does, after all, is to bring to the surface the areas in us He wants to work on and perfect, to continue what He began in us on the day of our conversion and to “bring it to completion” (Philippians 1:6, ESV).

“The party” (I speak generically) is the social venue where everyone talks faster than I can think. So it often happens that before I have a chance to process the comment just made by someone, and to formulate a considered response, it’s much too late. It’s like the man at the pool of Bethesda who misses out on his turn to be healed when the angel comes down and stirs up the waters because he’s not quick enough on the draw:

“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me” (John 5:7, ESV).

At this particular party Friday night it was a free-for-all group conversation around a table, not a one-on-one thing or smaller clusters of people in corners of the room. To make matters more challenging, they were all talking about movies and actors and scenes from movies, topics I am a dunce in.

In the redoubtable mystery of group dynamics, it has been well observed that the silence of one person in such a setting becomes obvious and uncomfortable if it persists. And sure enough, one of the people in the circle at one point turned to me and said—perhaps to get me to talk or perhaps to defuse some general discomfort—“Don’t talk too much, Andrée.”

But the Spirit had been doing a little spadework in me in the interval between parties, and I had come to the peaceable realization that I am a “this” and not a “that”—and it’s OK. I am a slow thinker, a slow responder, a movie ignoramus, an introvert, a person with some gifts and not others—and it’s OK. And when we come to terms with who we are and who we are not in the world, we can relax and love others, and be thankful and rejoice in their gifts, and not covet them.