The Gift of Mingling
Some people can walk into a room full of strangers and leave with six new friends, three phone numbers, and an invitation to somebody’s family reunion.
Then there are the rest of us. 😄
In this episode of Scattered Moments, Matt confesses that while he’s perfectly comfortable speaking to a room full of people, put him in a barber’s chair and he can exhaust his entire supply of small talk before the cape is fastened.
Fortunately, he married a professional mingler.
From Darlene talking her way out of his speeding tickets to inviting a timeshare salesman to church, this humorous reflection explores the strange differences in the ways we connect with people—and the danger of allowing our personality to become an excuse for keeping others at a distance.
Jesus continually noticed the person others overlooked. His conversations were often simple, spontaneous, and ordinary—and sometimes those ordinary conversations became life-changing encounters with grace.
Maybe loving our neighbor doesn’t require becoming an extrovert. Maybe it begins with something much smaller: noticing someone, asking a question, listening to the answer, and being willing to enter a moment we didn’t plan.
Even when that person happens to be writing us a parking ticket.
Welcome to Scattered Moments. I hate haircuts. Not because I'm trying to grow a man bun or because I'm hoping to look like the surviving member of Led Zeppelin. No, I hate haircuts because they require conversation. Before I go, I have to prepare a mental list of things to talk about with the woman who cuts my hair. I've got the weather, that's good for about 45 seconds. I can ask her how her day is going, and that's another 30 seconds. I can tell her what I do for a living, although that usually creates more questions than it does answers. And then about three minutes into the 20-minute haircut, I'm exhausted. My entire conversational inventory is gone. And there we sit. She cuts. I stare at myself in the mirror. Neither one of us knows what to say. I usually tip a little extra because, frankly, who can put a price tag on awkwardness? My wife, Darlene, has never had this problem. One of the greatest blessings of our marriage is that my wife knows how to mingle. I just tag along. As much as I've prayed for it, the Holy Spirit has never anointed me with the gift of mingling. Perhaps something happened in my childhood, or maybe I took that old parental instruction too seriously. Don't talk to strangers. Darlene, on the other hand, apparently missed that entire lesson. She talks to everybody at dinner parties and church fellowships. I'm perfectly happy to smile, nod, and let her exercise her spiritual gift of conversation. She's so good at it that she once invited a salesman to our church while we were attending a timeshare presentation. Think about that. We went to hear a man sell us a condominium and she sold him on coming to church. We didn't buy the condo, but he showed up the following Sunday. I'm pretty sure that's somewhere in the book of Acts. And then there are the speeding tickets. Darlene has talked her way out of three of my speeding tickets. Three. She turns on the charm, occasionally produces a tear, explains why I was speeding, and the next thing I know, the officer is tipping his hat and sending us on our way. I've never talked my way out of anything. If I'm pulled over, I usually have my driver's license, registration, and credit card ready before the officer gets to the window. I know how this story ends. Darlene, on the other hand, could probably get pulled over for speeding and leave with an invitation to the officer's family reunion. She is a professional, and I am a very grateful, conversationally challenged husband. My dad was the same way. He was a total extrovert. That man could talk to anybody, and he would. He usually started with a joke. He had about ten of them in his holster, ready to deploy at a moment's notice, and then he would begin trying to figure out whether he was related to the person. I learned at a very early age that we were apparently related to everybody in town. Everybody. It was a gift. And somehow that particular gene skipped a generation. Now here's the strange thing. I have absolutely no problem standing in front of hundreds of people and speaking. Give me a pulpit, a microphone, and a passage of scripture, and I'm pretty comfortable. It's a controlled environment. I've prepared what I'm going to say. Everybody stays in their seats and I stay on the platform, and for the most part, nobody talks back. It's a beautiful arrangement. But after the service, when people come to speak to me, something strange happens. My first instinct is to apologize. Sorry I went long. I hope you could hear me. I don't think I said it quite the way I wanted to. People come to tell me that they appreciated the message, and I immediately begin trying to talk them out of it. It's a peculiar condition. I can speak to a crowd without a problem, but sometimes I struggle to connect with the person standing right in front of me. And I've been thinking about that because as much as I enjoy being an introvert, I don't want my personality to become an excuse for missing the people God places in my path. There's a difference between being comfortable with who you are and becoming so comfortable that you never reach beyond yourself. Jesus had this extraordinary way of noticing people. He noticed Zacchaeus in a tree. He noticed a woman who had been suffering for twelve years, even in the middle of a crowd pressed against him. He noticed a blind man sitting beside the road while everybody else was trying to keep the man quiet. And he noticed the Samaritan woman who had come to the well in the heat of the day. What strikes me about that encounter in John 4 is how it began. Jesus asked her for a drink of water. That's it. Simple request, an ordinary conversation. But that conversation became an extraordinary encounter with grace. Jesus crossed cultural and social boundaries to speak with someone others might have avoided. He listened, he asked questions, he spoke truth, he offered her living water. Now I'm certainly not suggesting that every conversation at the barber shop needs to turn into a sermon. Trust me, nobody wants me explaining the doctrine of sanctification while they're holding scissors next to my ear. But I wonder how many opportunities we miss simply because we don't want to be uncomfortable. How many people are carrying burdens we might never discover because we never ask how they're doing? How many moments of encouragement are lost because we're too preoccupied with finding the perfect thing to say? Maybe the gift of conversation isn't always about knowing what to say. Sometimes it's about being willing to listen. And maybe that's where those of us who aren't naturally gifted at mingling can begin. We don't have to become the life of the party. We don't have to develop ten jokes or discover the way that we're related to everyone in the room. We can simply be present, ask a question, remember a name, listen to an answer. Notice the person who seems to be standing alone, and when God opens a door and be willing to walk through it, even if our knees are knocking. The Apostle Paul wrote in Colossians, walk in wisdom toward those who are outside, redeeming the time. Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one. I love that phrase, let your speech always be with grace. Not necessarily clever, not necessarily impressive, not necessarily or particularly entertaining, just gracious. And that's a great place to start. I don't think God is asking me to become Darlene, and I'm fairly certain he's not asking me to become my dad. But he is asking me to love people, and sometimes loving people means stepping outside the comfortable little world I've constructed for myself, which brings me to something that happened recently. I was walking back to my car when I noticed a parking officer standing beside it. He was placing a citation underneath my windshield wiper. Apparently I had parked in a no parking zone. Now the old me would have quietly approached the car, waited for the officer to leave, retrieved the ticket, and driven away. Possibly while pretending I had never seen him. But I'd been trying a little bit to become more daring in my interactions with people, so I walked over and struck up a conversation, and you know what? We had a wonderful time. We talked about our children, we talked about how much our city had grown. We talked about the importance of random acts of kindness. Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes of meaningful conversation and human connection with a complete stranger. I was practically darling. I thought to myself, look at me, I'm mingling. And when our conversation finally ended, that officer smiled, wished me a good day, and went on his way. He still gave me the parking ticket. Apparently, the gift of mingling doesn't come with a gift of getting out of parking tickets. But I did walk away with something. A reminder that sometimes the person we least expect to connect with is the very person God places on our path. And maybe the point of conversation isn't always to get something out of it. Sometimes it's simply to give someone a few moments of our attention. A little kindness, a little grace, a little reminder that they matter. Even if they're writing us a ticket. So, if you're like me and the thought of making small talk makes you want to schedule a root canal instead, here's a little encouragement. You don't have to be the extrovert to love your neighbor. You just have to be willing to notice one. And who knows? The next time I get a haircut, I might even make it through an entire appointment without running out of things to say. Although I'm still gonna tip extra, just in case. And that's today's scatter moment. So take heart. Notice the scatter moments and share the grace.
