Relationships

 

Distracted from my sorting through old prayer journals: I took my senior year high school annual from the bookshelf and sat back, slipping into a time in the far distant past. Remembering friends and fellow students who walked with me through those often turbulent teenage years, trying to discover our identities, feeling our ways forward into further education at colleges and universities scattered across the country. Having been connected with this large group of people my age, some for 12 years, we graduated and scattered, lost touch, lived our lives. Some – many – have already died.

The custom was to sign one another’s annuals and I was amused with how similar most entries were: wishing me well, wishing me luck, saying I deserved it, saying kind things about me. A few stood out; one in particular, because since I was eight years old, Jenny has been a friend.

A friend. The kind of friend who knows your good and bad traits and sticks with you anyway. She wrote a page, recalling memories of moments together, shared times as we struggled to make sense of our world, to figure out relationships, to live well during times of uncertainty – the war in Vietnam, which affected the boys in our graduating class as instantly they became eligible for the draft unless they had a good reason to defer. Nuclear annihilation was always a possibility. Racial injustices and civil disobedience. The hippy phenomena. A turbulent time to step out as a fledgling adult.

Jenny and I had more memories to make together. Memories made in each others’ universities when we visited one another; memories made in Europe when we both did a year studying overseas, Jenny in Bordeaux, me in Stirling. Memories made after university, each others’ weddings, letters and now emails and lunches every time I go back.

And now. Her husband is growing frail; things are difficult. Across the miles, we try to encourage one another.

Life is a gift from God, and part of that gift is friendship which stays the course.  Friendship which lasts through a lifetime, across the miles.

May God bless and deepen friendships; may he restore relationships which may have grown cold, distant or broken; may he deepen relationships in the high-tech generation who connect through the devices rather than over an ice cream.

May he deepen our relationships with him, the trinity being the epitome of what relationship can be, in him.