A God Thing

I'm not really a superstitious person, but isn't there a saying about bad things coming in threes? Well, I've had a run of three recently, but I would have to categorize them all as "good".

I've always been wealthy in the arena of friends. People who I learn from, laugh with, whine at, feel envious of, and sometimes get hurt by. (and it goes without saying that I've likely hurt them as well). I often assumed, as the friendship season would change and we'd drift our own ways, that there was something about me that made it "not worthwhile" to maintain the ties. That my stupidity and neediness had just sucked them dry and they needed to wander off and find a watering hole lest their investment in us should wither them to death. Not that I believe every friendship should be stubbornly maintained well beyond the "best before" date. Some friends are with us for a season, and that's a gift all on its own. And some friendships take a siesta for a matter of months or years or centuries and there's nothing particularily deep about it. We pick up where we left off, and carry on from there.

Every relationship is significant and needn't turn into a project of phone calls and belaboured coffees. Well, there are one or two relationships that I think are in my life to showcase my worst characteristics, and I suppose an optimist would say that they are here to grind off my rough edges. So far, they just serve to make me more prickly and irritable. Maybe I'll work on that in my forties....

An-eee-Way.
I was saying.

Three good things. Events that touched my heart and made me think of God and redemption. How things can ache and chew away at a gal and no matter how hard you to try to navigate it the "right" way, the way you were taught in Sunday School, it pretty much just sucks and you can't make it line up nicely into a column.

Recently, three friends from my life in the eighties have found me and made contact after a long period of life having swept us all down different bunny holes. Like old pieces of myself, they came back and reminded me of these aspects of life that we'd all shared. Not together as a foursome, as all three friends came from very separate parts of my life in the eighties. One of the friendships ended badly. The other two didn't end at all, it just wasn't the season for investing in that part of ourselves, as we were busy padding our nests and pouring our bosoms into chubby little blobs of hungry humanity. (come to think of it, now we're padding our bosoms, and wishing we could pour off some of the blobbiness...)

Anyway, far be it for me to ramble. ahem. These three goodnesses, like the three wise wo-men, have entered my life and made me think about redemption. I have a feeling its a God thing and that I'm going to learn something about the way God redeems things and relationships. How important patience and faith in things not yet seen are. How all my sweating and striving don't necessarily write the final chapter in any book of life.

And that maybe, just maybe, we all used just a little too much hairspray in the eighties.