Something God Alone Can See

I am just easing into the internet world with baby steps. Recently, someone invited me to get on Facebook.com, so I set up a profile on there. I still have a lot to learn about it, but once I typed in my high school and colleges with graduation years, suddenly there was a display of pictures of people that looked like slightly older versions of people I went to school with. In other words, the website revealed to me other Facebook residents who happened to graduate with me from either high school or college. Wow, that was weird.

This year will be my 25th high school graduation reunion, though I doubt I'll make the trip back to New Jersey for the event. I found one of my best friends from high school on Facebook; someone I hadn't seen in at least 20 years or more. He looked the same, except now he has a real job, making real money. He's a grown-up. Why is that so weird to me? Somehow people from the past get frozen in time in memory. It was shocking to find college friends from 21 years ago, with CHILDREN! They've been entrusted with raising other human beings! This, from people who, like me, at the time, had trouble getting to class on time or finding a decent date. Of course, I have a teenage daugther of my own, and she's turning out quite well, I must say, but somehow it is difficult to imagine my friends from the '80s (a very weird decade, I might add) raising children! And from the pictures, they look like they're being fed and clothed. I guess my old friends might feel the same incredulousness at the thought of ME raising a real live person.

It's kind of a time warp, to look into the faces of people you haven't seen in 20 years. What ways have they changed? I can tell you how much I've changed in 20 years, and it's kind of exhausting, but it's hard to imagine my old friends differently from my memory of them. Isn't kind of arrogant to think your life goes on, changing and growing, while the rest of the world as you remember it in the past goes on just the same? We are funny, us human beings.

In the profile, I had to write the name of my hometown. That was a tricky question. Where is my hometown?? It's hard to say. I was a pastor's kid in the United Methodist itinerant system. That means we moved a few times. I went to elementary and junior high school in Red Bank, NJ, and high school in Woodbury, NJ. But my parents live neither place-- they live in Mississippi. I never go "home." There IS no "home." My parents' house is where they've retired in the last few years, in an area I only visited in the summers to see relatives. New Jersey is technically home as it's where I spent my first 25 years, but there's no one town I call "home." There's no "place" to return to for me, in New Jersey. Or anywhere, for that matter.

I could feel sorry for myself, but I think in this day and age, I'm not so unusual. People are moving all the time. Now I call Nebraska home, and I have no doubt I will live in Central Nebraska for as long as I have a say in it! This is home. I pray that Gibbon, Nebraska will be my daughter's hometown that in the future she can claim on a space in a form or a website profile; a place she can come home to when she's older and needs to remember who she is and where she came from.

But in the end, I realize through all of this, that nothing stays the same. And really, time is just time, a human-made construct. In essence, we are all eternal beings, we are God's created children. The details of that are too vast for my human, time-bound mind to get around, but I trust in the mystery. One of my favorite hymns, "Hymn of Promise" by Natalie Sleeth, says, "From the past will come the future, what it holds, a mystery, unrevealed until it's season, something God alone can see." I will trust God's creative Spirit to continue to shape, mold and continue to create my life and the lives of those I love. I don't have to know it all or understand it all. "Grace has brought me safe thus far," and I trust, that "grace will lead me home."