Cultivating Inconvenience

It is late.  Night has long since cloaked the parking lot, but my daughter’s whimpers and the bustle of the emergency room keep me oblivious.  I watch a patient walk by, and my eyes follow him to the window.  Just beyond him I can see my reflection in the glass pane.  My face is sunken, eyes tinged pink and lidded with fatigue.  I try to sit up straight.  As if cued, a voice beckons me back to the commotion of the hospital.  My attention is directed to the monitor.  The ER physician pulls up a radiograph.  

The defect is obvious.  My daughter’s collarbone is broken.  A greenstick fracture, aptly named for the flexible constitution of children’s bones.  The doctor reassures me that all will be well, and the next steps happen quickly.  In moments, my daughter is outfitted with a sling, and we are ready to head home.  Relieved but ready to collapse, I pull out my phone to call my wife.  I groan.  It’s way past any normal child’s bedtime.  My son is asleep, and if my wife comes to fetch us, she’ll have to wake him up, too.

I slump onto the nearest bench, wallowing in despair.  Exhaustion has a way of exaggerating things.  But I perk up just moments later, recalling the many conveniences afforded by modern technology.  I could call a taxi.  I could Uber.  

Instead, I call a friend. 

When I see the familiar Mazda pull up to the curb several minutes later, I smile spontaneously.  When my friend’s head pokes out the window with a crooked grin (most definitely because of my haggard appearance), I am overwhelmed by gratitude.  

The Inconvenience of Friendship

At that instant, my thanks is not directed to an app or even a driver who has rendered a service for pay.  This is where I normally bestow my appreciation in similar episodes, whether stranded at an airport or elsewhere.  But the degree of thanks is lessened on those occasions, not least because my attachments to those who help me are impersonal and hardly binding.  I offer a vague thank you, but my heart is not stirred.  And that packet of thanks is deposited and diluted in an amorphous, detached system called the economy. 

This scenario is different; it is not a transaction.  At the cost of my friend’s nighttime solitude, my appreciation pours out in a flurry of words recounting my exhaustion and his subsequent heroism.  My thanks are directed to the tangible man before me; it is personal.  The warmth of gratitude is concentrated between two people and immortalized in this relational entity called friendship. My affinity to him has deepened.   

This is not the first time I have imposed on my friend.  In fact, it has happened so many times we can no longer refer to it as an occasional inconvenience.  It is a habit.  A regular rhythm of life.  And it goes both ways.  He needs the van to move furniture.  I like having someone to talk to when I assemble a kid’s kitchen set, and I’m sure he’d enjoy a home cooked meal. From the beginning we have let each other know these practices are acceptable, even desirable, and that we welcome these daily interruptions as fodder for friendship.  

Before these practices became commonplace, they were occasionally unusual or even bothersome.  I would mutter in the back of my mind: you mean your flight gets here after midnight? This was telling of myself and my culture.  The average, young urban professional does not live a life riddled with social inconveniences.  Her life revolves around her, her time is her own.  And over the years, both by practice and by belief, she has come to see her individual existence as primary and even sacred.  

Beyond Independence

We live in a culture that fosters self-focus and self-preoccupation.  When our social ties and individual aspirations conflict, we tend to favour the latter.  Many of us have left loved ones behind as we move across the country to pursue our careers.  And this has shaped what we value.  We readily uphold the idea that freedom from restrictions and obligations is a fundamental good.  This is why we side with Moana and not her father.  Not wanting to be tied down, we want to be free to pursue the call from within.  

This impacts our relationships, which by necessity impinge on personal freedom.  We are careful to protect our own autonomy and space.  When meeting for coffee with a friend, we find a third-party vendor in whose shop we can sit and banter.  The idea of inviting someone into our home is a little too intimate, if not odd.  And rather than deliberate which channel to watch and to plant the family around the single TV set over the next half-hour, we turn to personally curated media on our devices.  The small sacrifices and troubles are averted.  We are taught to live on our own, and we have constructed our world to enable such independence.     

People of faith communities are no less susceptible to this tendency.  We live, after all, in the same world.  But we are not of the same mind.  We have this seemingly peculiar notion embedded in us through small groups and weekly worship that life is meant to be lived in community.  Talk about fellowship and bearing one another’s burdens is commonplace.  But what does it all mean?

This is the question my friend and I began to answer in small ways.  Both unmoored from our wider familial contexts, we had few people to turn to in times of need.  Yet both then and now, we have seen the importance of cultivating a friendship replete with inconveniences.  For it is precisely in these activities that we nurture an ethic that places the needs and goods of the other over the self.  At its heart, an inconvenience is the battleground of love.  

Life in community is necessarily restrictive.  And we are understandably hesitant to embed ourselves in people’s lives.  We don’t want to inconvenience one another.  Part of this impulse is good and true.  We can all recall that friend or acquaintance whose aim is always to take but never to give.  His appearance on our doorstep or phone screen is met with a mild sense of dread.  We are appropriately cautious. 

But there is something ironic in our hesitancy.  We are cautious precisely because we think of these little inconveniences as impositions and not as normal occurrences.  A friend’s impromptu appearance on the doorstep or the unexpected guest at dinner is normal and even commonplace in many cultures.  But if we live in individual silos, every one of these occurrences becomes a hassle.  And the irony lies in the restricted social lives we have created.  In wanting to be free and unburdened, we cannot have dinner with a friend without feeling like we have transgressed a boundary.  Accustomed to the social transactions of individualism, we have come to see these relational interactions as exceptional and even undesirable. We are like the child who, having only ever had Swedish berries, rejects a raspberry as too unusual. 

Habits of Inconvenience

If we find ourselves hesitant, I think we should be somewhat reassured.  We are unlikely prone to be overbearing in our demands.  Yet rather than reject these opportunities to engage in other people’s lives, we should embrace them.  Of course, this must be done with tact and mutual understanding.  My friend and I have understood these activities as conducive to the joys of friendship.  As something essential, rather than optional.  We must build such structures into our daily lives to mitigate the self-elevating currents of modern life.  

This process can occur on two levels.  First, we can develop habits that redirect our attention from ourselves to others.  This means minimizing tools that shape my expectations of the world to accommodate me and my desires.  I don’t browse social media feeds, and Netflix options are virtually always chosen collectively.  These changes may not directly affect our relationships, but they create a milieu in which I do not grow accustomed to personal convenience.  Second, we can intentionally create space for relationships.  I give my friends permission to intrude.  And I bug them too, even if it may initially seem uncomfortable.  From here, options abound.  Make pacts to drive each other around town.  Set aside a weekly evening to be in each other’s homes to share food and cleanup.  The pragmatics at both of these levels will differ according to situation, but the two-pronged approach holds. 

Many of us will be surprised.  The thought of an interrupted meal is annoying.  An unexpected guest can be unsettling.  But when we see the good conferred upon another, I think we will slowly be persuaded.  A peaceful dinner is nice, but a friend’s gratitude is heartwarming.  And while prudence and limits are always necessary in our world, we should open ourselves to new habits of relational joy.    

I close with a final thought.  A culture of self-actualization views sacrifice as an aberration.  But it is one that has not lost its moral weight.  We may not practice it regularly, but its beauty is not lost on us.  When my son was born, the church had implemented a call schedule for babysitters and hospital support.  The day was as smooth as it could be when welcoming a baby into the world.  And in being the recipient of such a blessing, my gratitude was spontaneous and indiscriminate.  I told my colleagues all about the journey, from rushing home while I was on call to the warm meals delivered to us by friends.  And one of my colleagues, a secular man with an aversion to faith, remarked how nice it must be to have a church community.  I smiled.    

Cultivating inconvenience is a labour of love. At the heart of Christian belief is the idea that there is one who has grossly inconvenienced himself for others.  Jesus took the trouble of his friends upon his shoulders so that they could enjoy lives of true freedom.  He invites us into his home for a banquet he has prepared at full cost to himself, even as we come with muddied shoes and no dessert or wine.  We are people who have been on the receiving end of kindness and generosity.  This is why we cultivate inconvenience: because we’ve been drawn into the greatest story of love and friendship in human history.  

So go and invite some people into your life.  They may love you for it.  

Text: Lester Liao