February 2023 Ridiculous Hour Foundation Mobile Mission

By Kat Silverglate, Copyright 2023

He was the director of an annual trial lawyer’s academy. He had this privilege for exactly one year; the privilege of selecting some of the best and brightest trial lawyers from around the country and preparing them to teach hungry young attorneys essential aspects of trial advocacy. With a steep decline in the number of civil cases going to trial, the students and the firms that sponsored them knew most in attendance would have few chances over the course of their careers to address a live jury. Whatever practice they did get during this week-long boot camp would be priceless and rare. The air was thick with hunger to internalize every precious nugget offered.

So this particular director chose a tightly focused theme -- an unforgettable sticky-word designed to penetrate the fleshy portions of each brain, even mine who was there to capture the story rather than participate as a lawyer. Nearly a decade later, I can still remember his one word theme and the essence of the lesson.  It went something like this...

“For a case to have life, it must have texture. Great trial lawyers don’t give bare conclusions. They go deep. Who are the people? What were the circumstances? Where is the nuance? You put the meat on the bones of a conclusion. You give the texture. That is your job.”

It was clearly a remember-this-one-word-if-you-get-lost-later moment.

When I ponder it, my brain goes to Flat Stanley, a bedtime story created by Jeff Brown in 1964 for his sons. Flattened by a falling bulletin board, Stanley is suddenly able to travel in a large envelope through the postal service to visit a friend in California. He returns home in a fresh new envelope full of stories of his time away. A worldwide literacy movement grew out of the book in the 1990’s when a third grade teacher in Canada started The Flat Stanley Project. Kids create their own lifeless cardboard doll and give it texture by drawing features and dressing it and writing in a journal about the life it lives with them in their own home, school and city. Then, like Flat Stanley, the cutout and the journal go through the mail to relatives, friends, other students -- even famous people -- with a request to journal and photograph Stanley’s experience in their culture doing what they do day to day. The website has photos of Stanley visits from Afghanistan and the Arctic to Zambia and the International Space Station and just about everything between.

Strangely, it seems like a fairly apt representation of our relational condition today. Flat. We flatten our images into pictures, voices into text messages, and movements into video clips and send our texture-less selves through cyberspace to others. From social media friendships to email to zoom gatherings, we now call this relationship. We comfort grieving friends through private messenger, reveal deeply personal details on Instagram and tweet opinions without looking into the eyes of the humans affected.  

Even the threads of our smallest most intimate daily touches have been relegated to texts. According to one state’s transportation summary [Vermont Transportation Stats Link], monthly text messaging increased by 7,700% over the last decade with more than 560 billion texts per month worldwide. Not including app to app messaging, 15,220,700 texts were sent every minute in 2017. The touch-less, voice-less, nuance-reduced, flat-emoji interaction, has become our new normal.

While much of this was necessitated by a global pandemic, continues to be an absolute gift to those who live at high risk medically, and is a true lifeline between those at a distance – one wonders if we’ve arrived at the place where we are voluntarily pulling the bulletin boards down on our everyday lives to make our way in a culture that insists flat is a reasonable substitute for texture. Flat “is more efficient.” Flat is where it’s at.

Meanwhile, people of genuine faith are opting for virtual attendance rather than physical gathering. Worldwide rates of depression, anxiety and suicide are epidemic. And therapeutic tools for sensory overload – like bookmark-size, textured, fidget strips to rub for calm -- are being offered on Amazon as “gifting must-haves” for “students, office workers, bosses and others” “of all ages.” Please don’t get me wrong. These tools are no doubt therapeutically essential for some, but don’t you wonder if the expansive need for them on the back of mobile phones, key chains and backpacks might be a tiny signal that our lives are more than a bit texture-deprived? We need texture. Human texture.  

The Lord who split the veil between heaven and earth forever defined our relationship with Him by presence. By the name Emmanuel He says “God with us.” When we are loved by the Lord and carry His presence around in us, full of HOPE, we give texture wherever we go; not just with our thumbs, but with our hands and feet. Our voices. Our lives. And when someone asks, why did you show up? Why did you come? Why do you want to talk to me?  Why do you care? Isn’t there a nugget of an answer in 1 Peter 3:15.  

Always be prepared to give an answer 
to everyone who asks you to give 
the reason for the hope that you have. 
But do this with gentleness and respect… 

1 Pet. 3:15.

Our February Mission:

Our mission this month is simple. We plan to push past the cultural norm of flatness and practice presence. We plan to add texture to our interactions with others by tweaking the way we bring our HOPE-filled selves to them. In your mission pack, you have a textured piece of fine art paper in the shape of a bookmark with 1 Peter 3:15 on the back. You also have five stickers that say “Hello My Name Is.”

Why five? February begins mid-week and ends mid-week which gives us three full and two partial weeks to practice textured presence.

Here’s the challenge. Can you be inefficiently present at least 5 times this month. Pick up the phone instead of texting. Visit. Call for no reason. Walk across the street to a neighbor. Introduce this part of yourself to others again – the part that has been flattened by a lack of presence.

Use those stickers as weekly reminders. Consider asking each person that you choose to be present with about their hope. “What’s your reason for hope?” Listen to their answer. They may be hopeless. Are you prepared to share your reason for your hope? Prepared to be the texture with gentleness and respect?

Use that textured bookmark as a reminder of the importance of physical presence. As a reminder that people need a reason for hope.

Share a Texture Moment With Us:

As we did last month with our Counting Detour’s Mission, we will be sharing a few Texture stories on social media. Have you got one? You showed up! Feel free to “Donate a Story” on our donation page. These come to us as a regular email. We sort and post a few. Your shares encourage us and others!

Invite a Friend:

Want to invite someone to join you in this mission? Send them to the orange “Get Started” button in the middle of the crazy clock/bike picture on our home page: www.theridiculoushour.com. 

Let's Pray:

Lord, You come to dwell in our hearts. When we bring our hope-filled selves out into the world, we bring YOU. You never intended the world to become so flat! So starving for touch and voice and presence. You came to be God with us. Present. Thank you for your presence. Bring us out into these beautiful February days [as we are safely able] to experience and share Your presence. Give us the curiosity to ask the simple question -- "what's the reason for your hope?" Poke us, prod us, nudge us to share the reason for our own hope when we are asked. Make us gentle and respectful in the process.

Amen?

Amen!