• Getting past just appearances •
[2 MIN READ]
When my new colleague arrived at the summer conference (SuCo) for my new organization, Coalition for Christian Outreach (CCO), Jon was wearing an Orlando Half-marathon 2024 running shirt. That got us talking immediately, but only briefly as we worked on getting into our respective rooms.
The next day, another new colleague, Cami, got to talking about going for an early run and we pulled together a group of 4 including Jon. Still, he and I didn’t talk one to one until the 3rd day. That lunch, I shared about forming first impressions of various staff members; all of whom I was only meeting for the first time, having just joined as an official volunteer the month before.
What I shared next has come from my perspective as a professional academic librarian. I commented about having learned not to judge a book by its cover but by cracking it open and starting to look at its insides—table of contents, foreward, excerpts of chapters, etc.—in order to gauge how much I’m willing to invest in it. Jon liked the analogy.
He leaned into my profession and told me he was working on a book concept. He wondered who I thought his target audience might be. Now many, many people have books inside themselves, but—to channel one published author—they should probably keep them there, given the difficulty of actually being able to write something compelling. It turns out that Jon’s idea was quite compelling and his concept, with working chapter titles, demonstrated what I thought was serious potential based on what I knew of related subject matter.
Read more: “Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again” (Joseph Epstein, The New York Times. Free gift access.)
I was getting to really like Jon. We were both distance runners and Christians as well as writers. That and we had similar visions for service, working as we were for the same campus ministry. We also conversed easily. It became clear that we had made fast friends of each other.
When we said goodbye on the 4th and last day, he admitted that meeting me was the highlight of his week. I had reached the same conclusion for myself of him. Then I completed the thought I had begun the day before about meeting him on the first day.
“My first impression of you was that you were too tall and handsome to have any brains.” Fortunately, my book-gauging instincts came through again, this time about his sense of humor because he laughed uproariously. “In fact, you’re deeply thoughtful and compassionate,” I concluded. It’s been a privilege getting a read on him.
FINE PRINT ¶Text: Calvin Wang (Wäng), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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