So, yesterday friends of ours celebrated their Silver Wedding. We, a
small crew of friends and family assembled in the gloriously named Dog and
Hedgehog. While we were arriving from the different places we call home, we
broke and ate hunks of bread that had been dipped into bitter olive oil and
sharp balsamic vinegar.
Not long
after we sat down at the long table, flies started to appear. It bizarrely made
eating indoors feel more like we were eating al fresco. But wine was flowing
and beautiful food was beginning to arrive and so the insects were relegated to
the league of minor occasional irritation.
'A day
to remember all the good things' said
my friend in her later speech, quipping that she had not had the opportunity
twenty five years ago and was sure as anything going to make up for it. They
had chosen to gather us, we who have weathered good times and bad, sometimes
together, sometimes in our separate lives. To sit with them, break bread, drink
wine and share delicious food. Applaud, cheer and celebrate all the goodness.
Flies on walls over the years have
witnessed the joy and sad of the years of the collective; the illnesses, the
births, the bereavements, the weddings, the broken relationships and the
enduring.
Most particularly with our
friends we have shared the goodness and pains of times in church
leadership. Times of difficulty are more recent and therefore in sharper focus.
Things go inexplicably wrong and are horribly messy, the wailing that no-one
else understands, periods of dark doubt, and baggage of unmet expectations. At
times closing in like hordes of insects, the overwhelming noise of buzzing is too
hard to bear and their sheer numbers close to snuffing out the Light.
A short nod
to those things too, in the conversation at the table, but an acknowledgement that
they have shaped us over the years, not defined us. The fact is
that the ones that matter are the ones who have remained.
