Smiles

Have you ever had the experience, after an animated chance encounter with a friend at the drugstore or supermarket, of walking off with a smile still lingering on your face, and then a stranger who thinks you are smiling at her smiles back? That happens to me quite often. Often enough that I believe it qualifies as a controlled experiment. Here is my empirical finding: If you smile at strangers (even accidentally), more will smile back at you than if you don't.

I always admire strangers who smile at me. I think they're so brave. Or maybe free. I can't get over the fact that some female cashiers even call me "Hun." I love that, but I would never dare call someone "Hun." It may be partly because of the neighborhood I grew up in, but I think it is mostly fear of a withering rebuke: "Excuse me, but I do not like to be called that."

I was in a spacious hospital elevator with my mother and several strangers the other day, making small talk with a fellow passenger who was about my age and who remembered the old elevators of the 1950s, with the wire mesh scissor gates and operated by a man in a dark suit. As we stepped out of the room-sized conveyor, I mumbled some pleasantry to her (I don't remember what), and she replied, "Have a blessed day." That's all she said, but it was enough to tip me off about her allegiance to Christ.

The problem with me is that I want to love other people-but I want them to go first. Yet see how little it takes to open the door of relationship a crack: A smile. A "have a blessed day." Who knows where it could lead?

Listen to commentaries by Andrée Seu.