Saturday, July 27, 2024

Dear God,

I did not expect a high school reunion to be the place where healing and restitution could take place and yet, it did.  In a small town in Indiana, USA.

The man was the last one to arrive following dinner.  He wandered straight over to me.  My friend stopped him from interrupting me while I listened to a fellow classmate.  When I turned around and saw him, I motioned for him to come over as I placed my arms around his neck and hugged him.  His opening words to me, "I have been thinking about you."

Over the next two hours in bits and pieces, he shared his family's earliest years, his parents drinking, their poverty with nine children and his embarrassing humiliation.  Describing his mother's awkward death as a refrigerator fell over onto her and his father's wonderment who would fix his breakfast, he apologized to me as my teenage boyfriend.  I listened carefully since I knew he is slowly dying with prostate cancer.  When he asked me for forgiveness, I gave it and whispered my love for him.  Shortly thereafter, he walked away thanking me and walking out of the restaurant to get back to his wife suffering with dementia.

All the way home I thought about him, our teenage time together and the amazing way you aligned the stars, opened the door to forgiveness and lifted a weary man's burden of over sixty years.

Only you

can lift

decades-old burdens,

dear God,

only you.

Thank you

for my

old boyfriend

and his desire

for wholeness.

Thank you

for blessing

both of us.

Yours, Andrea