Renewing acquaintance, or meeting up for the first time… - 10 November 2009

friends reunited, my space, facebook, netvibe, bebo, wayn.com…
Renewing acquaintance is a popular pastime which has spawned a veritable industry based around new ways of keeping up with more and more people.  I’m not sure how success should be measured in this department, I’ve even heard that there are people talking about quantity and quality measures of a person’s relationships.

Others are getting concerned that we live in too many ‘relational worlds’ to have ‘real relationship’.  So there is a move from ‘fast food’ to ’slow food’, from ‘catching up’ to ‘quality time’, and there is the question about what changes and what doesn’t change, about what you keep and what is disposable.

At school and university, I had the ‘Christian’ tag.  Not long ago I went to a 20th anniversary dinner at my old college.  It seems like only yesterday that we had a 10th anniversary dinner …and at that event lots of people wanted to ask ‘big questions’ about their lives.  The ‘Christian’ tag has not always been a popular one, but it does mean that some people feel free to talk about these things.  

Achieving success, getting married, having children, meeting someone whose life just seems to work because they are a Christ follower, saying ‘goodbye’ and moving on, depression, the death of a friend or family member, suffering failure, living the humdrum workaday world, having cause to celebrate and wanting to thank someone ‘out there’… These are among many reasons that come up in many of these conversations which are often not just about renewing acquaintance with each other, but have an element of considering renewing acquaintance with God or becoming a friend of God for the first time.

This yearning for connection is not surprising.  Relationships are important, and we were made to be in relationship with God – to be his friends.  As Jesus said,
“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” John 10:10 [NIV] and as Augustine wrote “God has made us for Himself, and we are restless till we find our rest in Him.”