When I was around the age Izumi is here (five), I distinctly remember the torturous after church hours, in which I was dreadfully hungry with no food in sight (back then, we didn't have snacks every minute all the time the way we do now). My parents would be chatting to their friends, I would be pulling on them, begging and pleading, "Can we go NOW?! Please!". They would say, yes, yes, brush me off a bit and continue their "fellowship" (that's what conversation was called for Christians in the 70s).
In general, I don't actually have a great memory, especially for details. However, I think there are a couple of reasons the moment mentioned above is still with me. First, I'm not entirely sure it WAS just one moment, I think this memory is more of an amalgamation of many moments over multiple Sunday mornings, and Sunday nights, and Wednesday nights. Also, somewhere in there, I said the following to myself, "When I get big like Dad and Mom, I'm not going to do that".
HA! Falser words have never been sworn to the self! Indeed, if I had my way, I would certainly be the last person remaining in the church lobby after any given gathering. Amend that to be, not just church lobby, but any space where numbers of people have gathered and I have been among. So what am I doing? Why am I flagrantly ignored my childish self--or perhaps more pertinently, my in-the-flesh children who have moved up to be the ones pulling on me?
Because I am hungry.
Not down in my stomach, but in my heart and in my spirit, I MUST connect. If you and I stand in the lobby long enough, and Sunday after Sunday enough, and then go to the movies together, and then you come here and I go to you. And if we have coffee together and cry and laugh together, and if God gives us the miracle of the time and space and desire to just BE, just like that.
Well, then.
I will feel safe, I will know, even if you leave or even if I leave--though I haven't yet--and even if I am desperately, achingly sick with the longing for all sweetness and wonder that were those ordinary moments, even then. You are still with me, so that when long times go by and we live worlds apart and have children we haven't introduced to one another. No matter, all those things gigantic in our seemingly separate lives, because when we speak again, we may as well be in the church lobby or in the dorm room or in the office or wherever the unassuming space we first connected.
Don't you think that moment holds just the very teeniest sliver of the glory,
that Glory, the one where we will see Him?
I do.
Inspired by E who I was privileged to talk to today, for the first time in months (years?)
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