Today’s National Day Calendar celebration is going to make a lot of us uncomfortable, including myself. Allow me to set up this celebration that maybe shouldn’t be celebrated. Or should it?
You visit someone at Parkview Hospital in Ft. Wayne. The person you are visiting is on the sixth floor. You stand with a group of people on the ground floor, hit the elevator call button, and enter like a herd into a small cubicle, awaiting to arrive at your floor. Immediately, you tense up and try to figure out what to do. Look up? Look down? Fiddle with your phone? Close your eyes? Hold your breath?
What makes us so uncomfortable in the elevator? Sociologists suggest several factors. First, it’s a form of claustrophobia, intensified by xenophobia – the fear of strangers. This was implanted in us as children as we were taught about “Stranger Danger.” Second, there is no social rule book or script to govern what we should/shouldn’t do in an elevator. Third, there’s the increased awkwardness caused by everyone’s silence – or by the one person who thinks they are the host of a talk show and decides to interview the group. Fourth, we have been taught about spatial awareness. With a mixed group on the elevator, you go into assessment mode, sizing each person up as to whether they have plans for good or evil. If evil, how will I respond. Finally, there is the fear of small talk. All of this makes an elevator ride uncomfortable.
While some may think this is a ridiculous reaction, think about this in another way. If you’ve ever travelled on a bus, if there is a seat next to a stranger and open seats in an empty row elsewhere, do you sit down by the stranger and make a new friend? Probably not. You will go to the empty row every time. This is the same thing that happens with the elevator ride and for the same reasons.
So, back to today’s National Day Calendar Celebration. This is National Talk In An Elevator Day. The suggestion is that we start conversations, tell jokes, or initiate an impromptu spelling bee. I can’t personally see myself doing any of those things and I know a few people who would think this is a great idea. When the elevator comes, I’m telling them to go ahead – I’ll wait for the next one to come.
Biblically speaking, I cannot say that silence or talkativeness is the right answer for the elevator ride. What I can say is that we need to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” (1 Peter 3:15) If someone asks us about the Lord or gives us an opening, we need to be ready to answer, regardless of where we are – elevators included.
Perhaps we need to enter elevators with Paul’s prayer in our heart as found in Colossians 4:2-4. “Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving; (3) Withal praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds: (4) That I may make it manifest, as I ought to speak.
WE don’t open doors; we wait for GOD to open them. And we speak as we OUGHT to speak, not as we WANT to speak.
Let’s also recognize that we have different personalities. God has gifted some folks with the ability to talk to a stump. Others have the gift of shyness. One is not a better person than the other. If God wanted to, He could have created all of us with a gregarious personality, but He didn’t. To critique or criticize either personality is to make a judgment against God.
Whether in an elevator, store, classroom, neighborhood, bus, or wherever God may take us, if He opens the door of utterance, let’s walk through it carefully, dispelling any fear because of the teaching of 2 Timothy 1:7-8. “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. (8) Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God.”
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