The Group

Today was the day the Lord has made, and I did rejoice and was glad in it.

I was also wearing the color purple, which I've discovered makes me feel more creative than usual. Not that I created much. But I thought about it. And that counts for something. You have to have so much thought in proportion to what is actually produced, kind of like needing forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of good maple syrup.

Today I began learning to act "groupy," as my math teacher so aptly put it. Group project? In math? Ok, I thought, I'm ready for anything. I shoved my bulky desk around and glanced back and forth at the rest of my group-- two girls whose names I still didn't know. I wasn't sure what we were doing, but I assumed they would.

I scanned my group mates' faces for vital signs. They looked like they hadn't had their coffee yet. They looked unhappy. They acted like they didn't know if we were a group or not. I thought it would be a nice group. We would sit there and do our worksheets and maybe I would ask them questions if there were problems. But after yesterday's massive homework initiative, I was pretty confident about the graphing thing.

We mumbled a few words to each other and one of the girls pulled out her homework to work on instead. I asked their names and forgot them immediately. I worked at my graphs, trying not to panic at my tendency to freeze when called on to work math problems in public. Ms. V's lovely asymptotes on the marker board looked like a multicolored snowflake, delicately resting on the surface of my brain. But now, the board behind me, the privacy of my brain was being invaded.

And that was only the beginning. Ms. Verheyden showed up on my left. "Are we being groupy?" She wanted to know. "Not really..." I said, laughing a little nervously. "Well, are you on the same problem?" "No..." I had just finished it, but it was more of an accident than anything. "Well, show them how to do it."

She moved on to another group, and we began to explore the complications of groupyness. We tried to talk to each other. I mean, we're girls, girls are supposed to be able to talk, right? I tried to explain the problem, but I really botched it. The only advantage I had was more motivation than the others, and while motivation is helpful, it doesn't explain algebra concepts in a matter of minutes.

But we tried, and I got an adrenaline rush, which I always seem to get in math class because I'm usually teetering on the narrow fence rail between the vale of understanding and the Stygian abyss of confusion. But I'm discovering the balancing itself to be a skill worth developing...and enjoying.

Later in the day, I again found myself in a "group," a group of all the people whose names begin with C in Ms. Rushing's sociology class. There were four of us. We were playing a weird little game to demonstrate the five types of social interaction- (Nonverbal, exchange, cooperation, conflict, and competition.) I love sociology. It's basically learning what everyone else & I are doing all day, every day.

We talked about Groupthink- "the idea that agreement with the group is more important than doing what you want or what is right."

Peer pressure. Our whole culture has an agenda and I can feel the waves of it surging over me when I walk around campus, every time I walk through a store. I can detect it and stand up to it to a certain extent, once again, in the privacy of my brain. There is a capital "They" out there that wants to eat my life.

But what I want to know is, when will be the time when I'll stand up and say what's really in my heart? When will I get to scream from a rooftop the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? When will I get to speak straight from the heart, straight out about the worth of every person I meet? When will I get to hear the others speak out what they really think as well? What they really want, down in the dregs of themselves, where they don't even know they want anything?

I find myself becoming a lover of souls. And I want to round all the souls up and grab their shoulders and shake them and tell them how much Jesus loves them and how rich life can be. But I haven't thought of a socially appropriate way to do that. So we'll see what happens. It wasn't socially appropriate for David to go dancing in the streets in his linen ephod, either.