Time with friends is a gift that needs to be “opened”. . .

I just returned from a week end in New York City with three very special women I used to work with.  Although we had seen each other for dinner many times over the years, we had never made time to travel and spend those long very necessary hours just talking and laughing, about the old times and the experiences that our fresh to us now.  There have been job changes and serious health conditions; family deaths and children leaving home and then returning with grandchildren.  Among the four of us, much has changed but our love for one another has been strengthened.  And that’s the gift.

We saw two plays in New York and shopped.  We did the Uptown bus tour and visited the Metropolitan museum.  We enjoyed great food and multiple desserts.  But most of all, we took time to just be present as witnesses to one another’s current journey in life.  Witnessing the stories, the struggles, the joys and the fears of one another is why we have been selected by one another for sharing this particular space and place in time.  No experience has been coincidental. No encounter unplanned for.

What a glorious awareness it is to know that our interactions here or any where are part of the divine unfolding that God has sent us an invitation to.  A statement like I’ve just made used to make me roll my eyes.  I have friends who still roll their eyes at such a statement.  But the idea, be it right or wrong, gives me comfort.  I surely may discover in the next phase of life, whatever that phase may be, that my belief system in this life was all wrong, but will it really matter then?  I think not.

I’ll look back on this New York trip for years believing in my heart that we were meant to be together for a few days of rest and relaxation because of the ideas we shared, the new directions for each of us that grew out of the sharing and the laughter.  Always the laughter.  I was told once that when we laugh, we are closer to God than at any other time.  How can one know if that’s true.  But the lightness one feels in the midst of a good laugh does, indeed, create a shift in how the moment looks and feels.  What greater sense of God can there be?