Sharing and Responding

I sent an email to the people in my family, explaining to them a bit why I was asking them to view/read this. I also spoke with my sister and mother on the phone to tell them more about it. With my roommates, I approached them in person and asked if they would be willing to read it and share their thoughts. My friend from high school and work I was a little more careful about approaching because we hadn’t spoken in quite a while. I texted one of them and Facebook messaged the other and we chatted about life and caught up before I mentioned anything about the essay. I also tried to bring the topic up in conversation so it didn’t seem like I was using them. I actually had my mom share my essay with my former seminary teacher, simply because he is super technologically challenged and wouldn’t read in unless it was in his hand.

I’ve talked to almost everyone I personally shared it with and will hopefully speak with my seminary teacher over the break, looking for opinions and reflections on what they read. I talked a lot more in depth with my roommates about the subject matter and we all had a big heart to heart where we talked about hard things we had gone through and things we missed and such. It was actually a really beneficial thing for us to do because it helped us form a deeper connection and get out of our own bubble and understand everyone else’s bubble for once.

My sister was an interesting one to share it with (she’s the one mentioned first in the essay) because it’s a topic we’ve spoken about quite frequently over the years. She was actually really surprised by some of the things I wrote because she’d never thought about it in that way. We went through almost the same experience and we were there together at both funerals, but there’s a fourteen year age gap between us that distinguished the experience. It was kind of a bonding experience and just a learning experience in general.

Sharing Katie’s essay with my friend from high school was such an incredible experience, because she was actually baptized while we were sophomores. She mentioned a time where we had gone to the park for lunch and ended up just talking about life and she told me that that was the first time she had ever thought she might want something more in life. I vaguely remember the conversation, but it made an impact on her as I shared my stories and thoughts, similarly to how Katie and her friends sat in the car and shared stories. It was a very uplifting and completely unexpected experience.