Reunion

Reunion is important.  I had the special gift of a friend visit me in my new home a couple weeks ago.  We had a great time.  We ate, we drank, shared our poems with each other, and we cried pondering our heartache and hoping for dreams to come true.  It was a banquet of words and memories and best of all, new memories.

Unfortunately, this profound and divine act is underestimated in our culture.  Have you ever planned a trip with an old friend and when you take your seat on the airplane to fly to them feelings of anxiety, worry, and fears of the time being a shadow of the good ole days flood your heart?  I am sentimental and really miss people, places, and FOODS.  I am beginning to accept this fact about me.  I think what my heart really longs for is reunion.  So many relationships we live with are fractured and carry a pang of disappointment so it is hard to invest and fight for reunion.

Reunion takes hope.  It takes your heart being free.  It takes you risking the proclamation of love for another.  So much so, that you invest hard-earned scratch from a days work, vacation time, and time away from others in your day-to-day.  But more importantly, reunion requires risk and vulnerability.  You are literally pushing your chips to the center of the table communicating to everyone that you are all in.  What a gift to say to another, “I have traveled a long distance to see you, to be around you, to adventure and birth new memories with you, but to relive the old ones, as well.  I have come here to simply say I love you.”  The risk is that it may not be reciprocated.  It may not be matched.  But does that matter?  It does, but what outweighs this is that you get to be a giver of a divine and expensive gift.

I will never be one to know what it is like to throw the winning pass in the back of the end-zone, or hit the walk-off homerun, or play a 5-setter at Wimbledon, but I can give all I have, travel as far as it takes, and hope to be known in relationship at the deepest places my heart beats for another.  I can and will reunion with you because that is what registers and clangs loudly in my bones no matter the distance, cost, or risk.

So please, go reunion with the ones far away.