Hello/Goodbye

We got to spend a little time with some of our favorite people in the whole wide world this weekend, people we hardly ever get to see. First, Jessica & Jackson came for the day on Friday. For a brief moment, it was as though they had never left.... O & Jack picked up right where they'd left off last summer, playing happily all day, and Jess & I got to do what we do best, which is to talk. It was such a treat! Then P & I got to see them (and Deacon) again on Saturday night, when Jess & her brother Tim appeared in concert as "You're Not My Mom" at Prelude Coffeehouse. They are both fabulous singers but realized recently that they had never performed together. So Tim assembled an awesome band, they collaborated on a set list, and a truly beautiful night of music was created! When they get it on YouTube, I'll post a link so you can see/hear for yourselves. Saying goodbye after the show was, I think, harder than saying goodbye when they left for Texas last year. Having them here made me profoundly aware of the hole it left in our lives when they moved. We miss them. A LOT.

Then on Sunday, we got to reconnect with the Silliman/Pickerill family. This is my BFF from high school, Julia. She and her family are leaving this week on a great adventure to Amsterdam to do a church plant for Vineyard, where Eric has been on staff for more than a decade. We had not seen each other since O was a baby, although we'd communicated in bits & spurts over the years. But when we walked into the clubhouse where her folks were having a little going-away party for them, it was just like old times. We had a wonderful afternoon, catching up, swapping stories, watching the kids play, and saying goodbye. Hello, goodbye.... just like that. I was left wondering how it happens that these beautiful friends who you love so intensely come & go from your life without you really recognizing that it's happening until you've moved on to the next stage. Suddenly, they're "old friends." When did that happen?!? What a blessing that we get to have them in our lives at all, I suppose. Although the awareness I had this weekend of them coming & going brought lots of tears. These two friends in particular--Jessica & Julia--have been two of the most obvious examples of God's hand in my life. There's a quote I love from Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies that sums up quite well who they are for me...

"My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt & fear. When I look back at some of these early resting places… I can see how flimsy and indirect a path they made. Yet each step brought me closer to the verdant pad of faith on which I somehow stay afloat today. "

They are two of the biggest, strongest lilypads on the pond of my life. How great is our God for growing them there.