For Wilshire Baptist Church
It’s the strangest sensation to poke around on Facebook and click through a string of friends of friends of friends and suddenly peek into the lives of people you once were close to but you haven’t seen in decades and haven’t even thought about.
There’s Truett, for example, who I went to grade school with and lost touch with when his family moved away. He was a nice kid and we had sleepovers a few times and played guitars together on the playground. But now he owns a vending machine business in Florida and he’s big into skydiving and has photos of himself and dozens of other divers creating snowflakes and other complex formations high above the earth. And then there’s Eric, who was a neighbor a few houses down and a little bit on the wild side, starting fires with matches and running across rooftops. It appears that he grew up to be a military man and is into muscle cars up in the Pacific Northwest. Both Eric and Truett were playmates for a season, but somewhere between grade school and high school they disappeared.
There are others out there that have been lost to the years, and I see them now 40 or even 50 years later on social media and I think, “Now wait a minute: How did they get from Point A to Point B? And how did they get there without me because we were so involved with each other’s lives once upon a time?”
These are discoveries that my parents couldn’t make about their friends when they were my age without going back to class reunions. I’m so glad I don’t have to do that because I find those gatherings awkward and uncomfortable. Now all that information is just a few clicks away, and it’s interesting in a weird, time travel kind of way to see where people are and what they’ve become. But social media has a way of bending time and space that feels edgy and unsettling. Forty years ago seems so close, and yet I see wrinkled, gray-haired men and women on the computer screen and I almost feel like I can’t breathe. Actually, I almost feel like this life isn’t real — like I’m an actor in a play or a character in one of my own dreams.
I saw an obit in the paper with a name that seemed familiar and I followed the trail on social media to an old friend from high school who I’d not thought about in decades and that really made me sad. And yet there’s probably no way we can keep all of these friends close to us. There’s just not enough time or space or room to hold and keep them all.
Leaving school days behind, I’ve worked a lot of different places, and I’ve usually left with at least one good friend who has transcended that brief work time together. It’s mostly happened naturally because as an introvert I have trouble handling multiple relationships, but give me one or two good connections and I’m happy. These friends add pieces to the puzzle of our lives and help complete the picture that we see on our last days — or that people see of us.
I believe God is the author of our lives, and these friends, whether brief or long-term, are gifts. Some will travel every turn of the road with us, some will accompany us for brief segments of the trip, and some are just characters we encounter at the rest stops along the way. But each one of them is a gift.