Saying Goodbye... Or Not

Today I drove myself over toward Chestnut Hill to say goodbye to Lindsay, one of my dearest friends, as she heads off to be a missionary in Costa Rica.

How many times I have driven that road before!  How many times I have jumped in my car and zipped over for a weekend with Lindsay and Amy, or an outing with the FBI gang.  How many times I have sat in that living room playing games, talking, listening to music, basking in friend-ness.  How many times that home has brought new life to my spirit, giving me strength to head back to college or teaching.  How many, many memories...

And it was so real that those days were gone.  Many of us have moved away, and now the one who could arguably be called the nucleus of it all was up and going to Costa Rica. 

Granted there was a tad bit of melancholy.

But at the same time there was a whole different reality that was simultaneously present in my mind and heart.  In class recently I was lecturing on Augustine's "City of God."  He was writing about the fall of Rome (an event which, I concede, was slightly more traumatic than the events I'm writing of), and pointing out that that event, seen from the perspective of the City of God, was but a stepping stone to something much greater.  The rise and fall of empires play a support role to the real point of history: the reconciliation of man with God.

It's not that things fall apart.  It's not that things are subject to random change.  It's not that we simply can't hang on to those things in the past that we so loved, and that provided such security. It IS that our lives are progressing TOWARD something.  We're changing because we're getting closer to a goal.  My friends are moving away and undergoing significant life changes because they are on a journey toward God.  How clearly I have seen that in Lindsay's experience!

And here's the key: I am on that same journey.  I, too, caught up in my teaching world in RI, am traveling toward that goal.  So even as life is shifting and changing, there is a deeper certitude and steadiness that comes from the fact that I and these my friends whom I love are on the same path, going to the same place. Even as physical distances are stretched to limits I never could have foreseen, in reality we are drawing closer and closer together as we approach that final destination where we will have perfect fellowship with each other, and most of all with God.

As I traveled back home through those winding, autumn colored roads to the home of my childhood, the song I was listening to was called "All Shall Be Well."  And I believe it.