Secrets: Part 1

Father and son

At lunch today, I listened as the guy behind the counter called to most everyone who walked in by their first name—and smiled. Joe is very friendly and he, like the place, is loud. Several TVs with mostly sports and news were on and people sat around crowded tables conversing—happy to have a place to sit in the lunch rush.

The tables are close together, and I ended up sitting perpendicular to a father and son.

Their body language suggested the intensity and trust that comes only through that unique relationship (another post for another day). They were leaning towards one another over the table, arms folded comfortably on the table’s edge, and their eye contact was unyielding in an urgent but completely loving and accepting kind of way. There was a sports highlights reel playing, a pretty girl who walked by, and continual motion all around them—but it seemed that they were completely unaware of it.

They were honed in on one thing: their own private conversation.

This kind of intentionality is distinct in and of itself in this age where phones serve as mini-computers that constantly buzz, vibrate, and ding with social media’s latest distraction—there were no phones on the table that I could see. But their personal connection or lack of disturbance was not what drew me (not usually an eavesdropper) to their conversation.

It was their quietness—their stillness—and the distance between them and the world.

They were talking the entire time… I just couldn’t hear what they were saying. And that intrigued me.

I could hear 18 other conversations, but the one I wanted to hear was precisely the one I couldn’t.

They modeled what you and I already know: there is something more attractive than the obvious, than the easy, than the amplified. Less is more and sometimes the hidden things, the secret things, the treasures that you store up in your family or for yourself can be the most important, leaving the world in the dark.

There’s a scriptural basis for this notion.