An old friend comes to dinner

I had a friend I haven’t seen in years over for dinner last night. We grew up going to the same church, but she was three years behind me in school so I didn’t have a whole lot to do with her there, but then when I was in fourth year at university, and she was in first year, we shared a house in Armidale. Well it was not a house so much as the top of the old Catholic seminary, which was bought by the Free Presbyterians. It was a queer place, with a round room we turned into the lounge-room in the top of the steeple, though we didn’t really use that room because it had no window that you could actually see out and weird acoustics, but it was ideal for students. There were four large rooms down a long corridor, which each had off-peak heating, a big cork board on the wall, a whole wall of cupboards, a sink in the corner (amazing the bathroom hassles that can be solved by everyone having their own sink and mirror) and a great big dormer window you could sit in to read or study and look over the paddocks beyond. And sometimes we’d act like we were in a Manhattan movie and hang out on the fire escape (till we were told that’s against fire regulations or some other thing).

This friend was in the room next to mine and we used to clown around some. Yet I have scarcely seen her since. I finished university, while she stayed on, then I went off to Queensland while she moved south and our lives went separate ways. She has been married and had three children (sadly she is now separated, and has been so for years because she’s tried hard to reconcile the relationship and not get divorced, but the risk of relationships is that you are in them with other people, and we don’t get to control the actions of other people) and I’ve stayed single …

We’ve been commenting on facebook for a few years now that we should “catch up”, so I decided to bite the bullet and see if she wanted to come for dinner, even though she lives way out in the North-West and I live in the Inner-West of Sydney. And to my surprise and delight, she was happy to trek in to my place on a 'school night'.

We had a really nice evening just picking up where we left off all those years ago, catching up on life since and discussing how unpredictable it all is, but also how we can trust that God is working in and through what comes. I’m hoping we don’t leave it so long till next time.