This week I received an invitation to my thirty year school reunion! My first reaction: “What! It can’t be! Thirty years! Goodness! It is!”
After the shock had worn off I started to think about reunions. I refused to go to our five year reunion because I was (very) pregnant with our first child and feeling enormous and self conscious. The ten year reunion came along and I felt that it was going to be a sizing up of successes and failures and again I declined the invitation. By the twentieth year, I felt things might have equalised, life having dealt its smiles and frowns on all of us. I went and it was a happy-sad evening. Now I wonder why we have reunions at all. We gather a group of almost strangers together, the only common ground being the fact that we went to the same school thirty years ago. What is the purpose? I think it may be the desire to connect. The hope that some meaningful relationships will be forged that, having a link in the past, may extend into the future.
Then my thoughts wandered to the final reunion. The one where we are reunited with our loved ones in heaven. What joy will fill our hearts when we are welcomed home by the ones who have gone before us. Our common ground is Jesus. Our beginning and end is Jesus. Our focus and passion is Jesus. Our reunion will have no shadow of sadness or pain, no regrets or shame. Our reunion will not be coloured by our failures or successes but will be filled with praise to the One who made our unity possible.
In the meantime we celebrate mini reunions wherever and whenever possible. We call them the congregation of the saints. A shadow of the great reunion and a reminder of what is yet to come.
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