Reconnecting With Lost Friends

It's always a wonderful thing to reconnect with an old friend. I know that, for every person who becomes separated from someone important to them, there's a reason that that separation occurred. For me, it was separation from a good friend from high school and early college years -- and it was because of my irresponsibility and lack of consideration of how my actions would affect others that the separation occurred.

Twelve years later, we've again gotten in touch, although this happiness for me resulted from the tragedy of a death in his family. I had actually thought off and on over the years about contacting him to see how his life was going and to apologize, but I never did. Now, in the midst of his grief, he contacted me to thank me for what my family had done around the time of the funeral -- and we ended up e-mailing back and forth in a way that seemed like we had just talked last week, rather than more than a decade ago.

I finally did take the opportunity to apologize for what I had done those many years ago, and was told that he had never carried a grudge about it. So this weight that I had been carrying around all these years was self-imposed, and it was a burden that I never needed to have in the first place. I've always been amazed at how people can carry weight around with them for months, years -- their entire lives -- and not feel that they can shed that burden; now that I've been given this new opportunity to look back at a big phase of my life, I can see that I was doing the very same thing.

I'm now hopeful that this friendship will get back on track, and we can catch up on everything we've missed over the years. I'm still amazed at the large blessing that came from just a simple "thank you" e-mail; as someone close to me told me, "He may have thought he was just making contact, but God had another plan."

This person went further in commenting earlier on this blog, "You will, of course, make mistakes in your journey. God knows I have and will continue to make them no doubt. But that's the way of a journey - mistakes will happen. You can't change the past - you make amends when you can, but you can't dwell there in the past."

And finally, a passage from Romans (8:28): "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."