This loving people thing sometimes creeps up on you in the most unexpected ways.
I was staying at a Christian retreat centre, aiming to have a nice restful and relaxing break, when this guy turned up who reminded me of those bunnies in the old advert for batteries. I think the technical term I'm looking for is hyperactive. This guy walks around a lounge where people are sitting quietly and points to an armchair and says loudly: look at that, this is top quality furniture, excellent upholstery! He turns to people he has never met before and says: hello, what's your name? He interrupts people's conversations to say: you two over there, are you a couple or are you two separate people?
And like those bunnies in the advert, he doesn't seem to stop to draw breath. (or, more to the point, to let other people draw breath...)
My immediate reaction was to think: oh, help, how am I going to cope? I'm here till Saturday and it's only Wednesday evening. Am I going to have to go hide in my room all the time?
Ok, "help" is a good prayer... and God can do pretty amazing stuff when I let him, and he did. By Saturday morning I was sorry to have to leave this guy behind. No - he hadn't been miraculously healed from whatever it is that causes him to behave that way, but I had come to feel affection for him. He hadn't stopped being a nutter, but he had become my pet nutter, he had become someone who is pretty unbalanced and behaves in infuriating ways but I know him and like him.
It did help that I'm aware of being unbalanced and infuriating too, in my own ways... So when he asked me if I thought he was crackers, I said: do you think I am? We had some fun banter around the possibility that we had each of us booked into the wrong place by mistake, thinking it was the local loony bin but then finding to our disappointment that there were no straitjackets and no pills.
The process of this guy becoming my pet crazy person started with a game of Scrabble. I had this idea of asking one of the others staying there - someone I got on well with - if she fancied a game of Scrabble that evening. Then he heard us talking about playing and asked if he could join in. She and I exchanged looks of panic, but there was no way we could really say no without being extremely rude.
So we sat down to play, but very quickly she and I were forced to lay down some ground rules to preserve our sanity. We had to find ways of explaining reasonably that we simply can't cope with the level of chatter that he tends to produce, that there's no way we could concentrate on the game if he kept yakking and that we simply found it exhausting. We explained all this whilst realising that he doesn't have a huge amount of control over this, so we just had to keep telling him to shush every now and again - but he took it well, he's an intelligent guy and I think he did understand where we were coming from, and he valued our company enough to accept the way we kept telling him to be quiet. The thing is, everyone needs to feel loved and accepted, and I guess we found a way of giving him love and acceptance whilst not letting it kill us.
He did seem a bit calmer the next day, he wasn't hanging around in the lounge all the time and pestering people like that first evening - he'd booked all sorts of activities which he obviously needs for letting out all that energy and internal chaos, and seemed perfectly capable of occupying himself, not needing people's attention all the time, though clearly pleased when asked to join us for Trivial Pursuit on the Thursday evening. On Friday night, my last night there, I sat in the conservatory doing a jigsaw puzzle and he sat on a bench outside, popping in once to tell me he was driving to the shops and ask if I needed anything, another time to offer me a sweet (yummy!) and the third time he just said good night on his way up to bed. And I found myself thinking: I'm going to miss this guy.
Which is not how I had expected to feel when he first turned up in the lounge on the Wednesday.
People grow on you. I've seen this happen again and again. Even people that bug you - there's a subtle change over time (sometimes, not always) where instead of that inward groan when you see them coming, you find yourself starting to smile at their quirks and foibles, you find that instead of getting cross you just smile indulgently, as you would at your child when they're being naughty again.
Knowing that I have my own quirks certainly helps, it helps to keep me in check when I groan about other people's infuriating habits.
There was a lovely moment during that game of Scrabble, when this guy moved the coasters on the table and arranged them in straight lines, looking at me looking at him and saying to me: I bet you think I'm crackers, don't you? (Was this before or after he went over to the bookshelves and straightened up all the books? anyway, he obviously has a thing about stuff being straight and tidy.) My response was to rearrange the coasters whilst explaining to him that whilst his crackeredness meant he needed things to be in straight lines, my crackeredness means I actually need them not to be in straight lines and it would really bug me if I had to sit there for a long time seeing those coasters in those neat straight lines...
"Everybody's normal till you get to know them"* is one of my favourite book titles of all time.
*(It's a book by John Ortberg, and it's really good, not just the title.)
