After (Five Minute Friday)

Joining with the community that is Five Minute Friday with the lovely Lisa Jo Baker. We like to write, not for comments or traffic or anyone else’s agenda. But for pure love of the written word. For joy at the sound of syllables, sentences and paragraphs all strung together by the voice of the speaker.

Five minutes on AFTER

Strange how some of those songs they use for the slow-dances are about after love has left the room. Your Dad and I were in the same class at school for the first time in the same year that ‘After the love has gone’ was in the charts.

‘Miss my baby’ was playing on the radio when we drove away leaving you behind to live for nearly a year without us. A man-child of fifteen years having to navigate his own after living with another family who were familiar, yet strange, because they were not your blood family.

We drove up the little hill with heavy hearts as a separated family the rest of us to continue life in a place that was planted on much bigger hills and deeper valleys. What we didn't know was that this after was just the start of a season of deeply experienced afters.

Cancer, fractured relationships, death.

But you have now just had your first year of after as a married man. And you would not be the person you are without those afters of premature separation from the core of your family.

In the midst of those years of the long after we sang these words together at your grandmother’s funeral.

Jesus the keeper of all our afters.

My hope I cannot measure, my path to life is free

My Saviour has my treasure, and He will walk with me