Only two weeks left...

Two weeks from now I will be driving the Camaro down the road to be re-united with my wife of 23 years. We have lived apart for the past eight months...and I have not enjoyed it much.

We are one of those couples that rarely spend much time apart. Her friends are my friends and vice versa...except when I am traveling (and I do a lot of that) we are together. We often have lunch together...we work out together...we sleep together...(although she usually goes to bed about 3 am, and I get up at 5 am, so that is not very impressive.) I was legitimately curious how I would handle these last eight months of us being apart. I knew I could survive, but could I survive well????

As this blog may be read by younger folks, let us just say, in the words of Sam Cooke, "there were times I thought I wouldn't last for long...," but I am still here. God sent me some excellent people over the past 8 months to help me through, and some of them I owe my very life to no doubt. Long-time friends called and checked up on me, parishioners encouraged and supported me, new friends pulled me out of new troubles, and all the way down the line to today...where in two weeks this separation will be over.

I know many people (like our service men and women) find themselves separated from their lovers as well...and unlike me, there is way less certainty that they will be re-united. I don't know how they do it. It is a testament to God's spirit that we survive the alienation, the separation, the loss, the destruction of relationships that nurture us and help us grow. I think that's what the Psalmist meant when she sang we are created a "little lower than angels." Sometimes, there's just too much pain to live in heaven.

If you have loved ones somewhere away from you...I know how heavy the heart can weigh...and if you have a loved one near...I know how free the heart can play...

Paul wrote centuries ago that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord...not even, I discovered over the past 8 months, "separation." Thank God, he was right.

May your tables be full, and your conversations be true.


PS: Thoughts from the Prairie Table will continue on as a blog of theological discernment for me...just on the southern edge of the prairie rather than the northern edge where I am now in Bismarck. I look forward to starting over in Omaha, and seeing what God has in store for me. To finish Sam's line, "because now I know I can carry on...it's been a long time coming...but change is gonna come."