You get what you give

I've been absent from online life for a while, barring the odd Facebook post. Last month I got so busy with the pantomime (review here) that I didn't have time to do any writing, and then... well, it was kind of hard to get back into it. There was always something else that I needed to do, and I wasn't sure that I had anything I wanted to say. Lots that I could have said, but not sure that I wanted to say it.

At the same time I had to miss church on a couple of Sundays (again, too much to do and only limited time to do it), and then because Rachel had extra dance lessons and Katrina was finishing up her dissertation I didn't get to small group on Tuesdays either. Unfortunately, with the exception of passing brief conversations at work, church and small group are my social world, so once I missed them I had cut down my contact with friends by about 95%. And at that point - because it was easy, because I was probably a bit stressed out and busy and a bit lonely, I started to succumb to self-pity. Why, I wondered, had nobody from small group phoned or emailed or sent a message via Facebook to see if I was OK? Sure, I'd said I wasn't going to be there for a few weeks, but surely someone would say "Have you heard from Steve?" and someone else would say "I'll give him a call during the week"? I began to wonder what would happen if I didn't go back. How long would it be before someone said something?

Thankfully all these maudlin and self-centred thoughts were stopped one day, when it occurred to me that I have never done for anyone else the things that I wished they would do for me. I don't call people, or send them messages, even if I KNOW that they're having a tough time. Sure, we don't have friends who drop by unexpectedly (well, none who are aged over 18), but I've never in the 12 years we've lived here gone round to someone's house uninvited just to say hello, see how they're doing, have a chat. I don't make any contact with people who I think of as my friends except when we get together for a common purpose on a Sunday morning or Tuesday evening; accusing anyone else of not making the effort is decidedly in the "throw the first stone" category.

Oh, and for anyone thinking that the title of this post seems familiar: New Radicals.