With a little help from my friends

One thing that I've found especially rejuvenating about the last couple of weeks of holidays has been contact with people close to me but who circumstances prevent me from seeing all that often. The move to a new area, new church (still in progress), has left me often spending most of my time with people I didn't know this time last year. The result? Well, I suppose on the positive side I'm making a lot of new friends, which is terrific, but the negative side has been the lack of terribly many people who know me well.

It's amazing how much difference it can make just to spend time - it doesn't need to be a huge amount - with people who know us well. The change it can make to our perspective is incredible. For instance, earlier this week I had coffee with my former housemate. We parted ways (not acrimoniously!) at the start of the year when I moved to the North and he moved back to Hawthorn. We were talking about how our old church was progressing (he's still going there), and then we got onto the topic of where I was now going to church. I shared with him my concerns - my issues with a church that I was attending for a while in there, but which turned out to be too far away for me to feel really connected to the community or to what it was doing ministry-wise. And what had seemed a very difficult decision to make - to move on from that church and find somewhere closer - was made to seem so simple by this comment that he made: "Well, staying there would have defeated your purpose in seeking a new church anyway." And instantly, it all came back to me - the many conversations I'd had with him, and others close to me, about how I was going to move onto a new church because I believed I needed to find one that would be ministering to the area I was moving to. Yes, I'd remembered that all the way through the decision-making, but it's incredible how clear it all sounds when someone can say it back to you, when you don't need to fill in all the gaps, explain all the pros and cons, when they can just say, "Well, yes, that was what you were thinking in the first place."

There have been many more positive times with friends and family this past fortnight. That was just one that stands out to me. Today I've spent almost the entire day hanging out with good friends, and I feel really refreshed and like a lot of things have been cleared up in my mind. It makes me realise how lucky I am that, while I don't have huge amounts of time to see my friends at the moment - I'm busy, they're busy, most of my friends don't really live nearby - the difference they make when I do see them is huge, a massive Godsend. Maybe I should be praying that I can have more times like this throughout the school term, to rejuvenate me while I'm working, rather than holding out for the holidays to renew in this way. I think I will pray for that. But it also makes me realise that I should be praising God for all the times like this that I do have, because, rare as they might seem, I'm so lucky to have them at all.