Reconnecting

I recently have been able to reconnect with some of my old friends from high school. Thankfully we're not too old that we can't remember each other any longer, just too old to recognize one another if we walked past each other on the street. None of us look the same. Well, okay there are a couple who look very similar but they're rare.

Reconnecting is an interesting thing. We often pick right back up where we left off years ago in the summer of 1980. Things have certainly changed us but inside we are still the same persons we were.

That, I think, is good news. Too often we tend to think of ourselves as adults who have to have answers and solutions for our daily problems, and tragically we extend that to assuming we have all of the answers all of the time. But late at night when we lay our heads down on the pillow we know that that is simply a mask that we're all too comfortable wearing. We still carry inside us the same wide-eyed kids that saw Star Wars for the first time, or Yellowstone National Park. We aren't completed jaded. It's always a temptation to become so, but even then we occasionally stumble across our feet and find ourselves in awe of something.

That is a profoundly wonderful thing because unless we recognize that we don't know everything, we can never have faith. We have to recognize that God really is above us and bigger than we are. We can't squeeze him into our little noggins and expect him to still be God. We're simply creatures after all, and far from omniscient. As I like to say in my adults' classes, if we have managed to get God all figured out, then our God (in this case it really is god not God) is to small, or our heads are too big.

There's another wonderful thing about reconnection. And that is simply that we can re-connect. We can always move our hearts closer again. This may be in the sense of renewing friendships long neglected, or it may be rekindling the love we once had for God. The intensity of that love can wane and become lukewarm far too quickly in our harried lives. But like the father of the prodigal son (that gospel story is really about the father and not the son), God waits for us to come around the corner and walk home.

Spiritually we all need to reconnect. We need to do it every single day as a matter of fact. That is, in part, what prayer is all about. Prayer isn't simply to ask God for this or that, to forgive this or that, to help this one or that one. At its absolute core it is to reconnect. To weld ourselves to God with such passion and intensity that we experience the burning of that love all through the day.

So, I for one, am thankful for reconnecting. It's essential for us to move forward. I hope we all dust off our kneelers and open our hearts to the deepest reconnection which all connecting and reconnecting is intending to point us to.