How does it make you feel being in touch with our friends from the early days of our marriage? DYFF.

Dear LORD:

Thank you so much for restoring our relationship with our loved ones from long ago. Help us to work out those relationships again. Be with us as we do so. Amen!

MDDL:

Your MEQ this morning was wanting to diablog before I left for work. I love it when you say "goody!"

I am excited about our renewed contact with our old friends. It gives me a sense of roots and permanence that I have lost in my wanderings. As you know, I have lived as a nomad. As Jacob said to Pharoah:

"As a stranger in a strange land have I wandered upon the earth. Few and evil have been the days of my wanderings, and fewer still than the days of my fathers before me."

If I could describe my lifestyle before I settled down with you it would be that: "A stranger in a strange land." I am in many ways a man without a country, community, village, tribe, or family. My relationships with any geographic area have been tentative at best. People ask me "Where are you from?" I reply: "Nowhere really." Which is true. Am I from Texas? It is misleading to say so. I have no attitudes in common with the typical Texan. I despise the place, really. I am much more like a Californian or Washingtonian than a Texan. But I am not really from either of those places, although I did live in California with you.

So I guess you are my family, tribe, village and country. And the friends we have shared. They are my tribe, village and country too.

My strongest feeling is one of connectedness. I am connected to the past in a way that I have not been for many years. It is like the feeling I felt when I held my son Samuel in my arms for the first time and wept. I knew that my life was within him. He was my connection to this earth, and mankind. And of course my connection to you. He made my presence on this earth have meaning. No longer was I a stranger in a strange land. I had a home at last.

My feeling is like that. A feeling of connection to family and friends. A feeling that binds me to this planet and makes me share its fate. I can no longer be ambivalent or apathetic about the state of this tiny rock spinning through space. Those whom I love, yourself included, occupy this space. And I must care for it lovingly. Connected warmly and firmly to the place where I finally belong.

Love,
Me