With the Understanding Also

We sang “Where No One Stands Alone” at church this past Sunday.

Now, in general, I agree with the sentiment expressed. But I do have an issue with Mosie Lister’s line, “But I don’t know a thing in this whole wide world that’s worse than being alone.”

All I can think while I am mutely letting everybody else sing that line (because I cannot, in all honesty, speak it myself) is, “Only an extrovert would say something like that.”

I mean, if you want to say there’s nothing worse than being without God, okay, you can have my provisional agreement. If you want to say that with God you’re never truly alone, we can find some common ground.

But right this instant, I am sitting on my back patio (my favorite room in the house), just me and the dog, and sure, the mountain laurel is blooming and the wisteria is just starting to fade and the birds are chirruping happily and I absolutely believe that God is here too because God is everywhere and my patio is His patio, but other than that I am all by myself here, with no plans to directly interact with another human being until my daughter gets off the school bus some time this afternoon.

This is pretty much my absolutely ideal day.

Of course, the reason my daughter goes to public school instead of being homeschooled like her older sister is because she is an extrovert, and my pretty much ideal day is her idea of an endless waking hell, so… she is at school right now, because I love her too even though we have fundamentally opposite personalities in this respect. You do you, my girl! I’m sure you and Mosie Lister would totally get each other.

As an introvert, I’m used to the idea that extroverts forget we exist. Mostly we’re off by ourselves, after all, and we’re happy that way. When we go out in public, we tend to put on our pseudoextrovert faces, so you might mistake us for extroverts when you see us at the grocery store or wherever – although, even with my pseudoextrovert face on, I can be easily identified by the fact that I am the absolute worst at pointless small talk, so if I completely forgot to ask you how your day is going and how your momma ‘n them are and whether you plan to go to the thing on Friday before I launched into whatever it was I actually needed to interact with you about, my sincerest apologies I’m faking it the best that I can people! And I can’t keep this façade up for very long!

And when the façade fails, I am going to come back to my patio, just me and the dog and God, and forgive myself for forgetting the small talk again because we all need grace and it is not my fault that extroverts wrote the dominant script for social interactions and their script includes small talk because extroverts are just like that.

Fine, thank you. And you?

Perhaps I will even listen to the hymn – it is pretty, after all – and laugh, because the “official” video of Elvis Presley singing “Where No One Stands Alone” includes a duet with Lisa Marie Presley and backing vocals from a slew of other “music legends who’d performed on-stage and/or in-the-studio with Elvis.”

Very fitting. I’m sure Mosie approves.

I’m still not gonna sing that line.