A transitional moment

"In a transition you strip away all those things that are not important and you discover what is real." (Erwin McManus)

I heard this statement this morning and it resonated so powerfully with everything that is going on with me right now - and in the lives of some of the people closest to me. This past Sunday we hosted a party for a friend who is leaving the US after being here for just over five years and is returning to his home country of Japan. I say "home" loosely because home for him has also included the UK. However, a week from today he is flying out of the US, via California and heading out east around the globe to japan. As three of us were chatting in the kitchen tidying and washing the evidence of plates of food and drinks, our Japanese friend remarked that he was grieving; thinking of the loss of the what he has had in Chicago for the past nearly six years - two of those years were out of school and out of Chicago - but here has been in the USA working towards his 2nd Master's degree and now he is looking to be on staff with a ministry in his country of origin working with students. So he grieves; the friends he has made and will not see for a long while again (if at all), the life as student which does come with responsibilities of studying and assignments but has freedoms that most of us do not realize until we are out of school, and deep relationships that can never be matched because we will never be the same again - ever - we will never have this time again, in this place with these people because moments only come in the time that we have them.

So I am learning that grieving does not only come when a life passes from here to the next, but when relationships are broken through geographical change and situation. We have technology to simulate connection but there was a reason that when God made the earth and everything in it, He looked at Adam and said, "It is not good for man to be alone." All the creatures had another but the human being had no suitable partner. We were never meant to be alone; in fact we were made for relationship to one another even though that gets messy at times. We were meant to live in community with one another and it is not good for anyone to be alone. That does not mean that we always have to live in each others lives in an unhealthy co-dependent way, but it does means that when a part of the body (and I mean "body" in a 1 Corinthians type of way) moves away, however that manifests itself (physically in this case), the body will hurt, possibly only for a while, but probably more.

Good -bye, Yasu, at least for the time being.