Reconnection

I have two funerals to go to which happen to be a day apart.
It is never easy to walk through the visitation line and express your heart to the family.
You have a few minutes to somehow try to encapsulate a lifetime.
The funerals I have to go to were both girlhood friends.

One could argue that there are many downsides to social media.
However, it is also through social media that old friends reconnect.
Such was the case with these two girlhood friends.
Many years ago, we found each other on Facebook.

It was all because of a picture.
I was cautious when I first ventured into the social media world.
I used my married name, which some of my girlhood friends would not recognize.
I did not choose to use my maiden name since I wanted to keep my contacts manageable.

I remember the day my best girlhood friend put a picture of us on her Facebook wall.
It was a picture of she and I, along with her brother, on the Good Ship Lollipop.
A very scary looking clown was standing with us in the picture.
I am sucking on a lollipop probably because I was a little afraid of the clown.

It only took one comment.
Is that Regina? someone asked.
Regina is my given name but when my husband and I dated he called me, Gina, and it stuck.
My best girlhood friend said that indeed, it was, and the floodgates opened.

I am so glad they did.
Girls I went to school with all those years ago are known again.
Some live locally; some live far away.
A Facebook group was created from our elementary school, since a reunion is being discussed.

It is good.
So may years have passed.
The faces are still the same.
The memories are very special.

One picture, from all those years ago, opened the door to old friends connecting again.
Stories and memories are shared.
You cannot help but be transported back in time.
The mirror may tell you that decades have passed but in your mind the memories are fresh.

It was through that Good Ship Lollipop picture that I reconnected with one of my friends.
She spent a lot of time at my house and I spent time at her house as well.
She and I and another friend were together quite a lot in elementary school.
We were in shows together and practiced dancing for those shows in the other girl’s basement.

It was so good to see her again.
She did not live too far away from me.
The smile was the same.
I saw through pictures and posts how much she loved her family.

I woke up the other morning to see post after post of condolences.
I could not believe what I was reading.
I called another dear friend just to see if it was a mistake.
Our friend from all those years ago, had died.

She had struggled with an illness for the past three years.
It was only recently that it became obvious that something was wrong.
I had never known; very few of us knew, the gravity of what she suffered.
And just like that, she is gone.

Another picture was posted years ago that showed a group Christmas Carolers.
I am the youngest one on the picture.
The two sisters that organized the caroling were kind enough to include me.
They lived around the corner and I was like an honorary little sister.

There I am holding the construction paper booklet that held all the words to the songs.
We are all bundled up and I am wearing a red hat.
We look like those Byers Choice Carolers with our mouths rounded in the shape of an O.
It only took one comment on that picture to find me again.

The two sisters had us all back to their house for hot chocolate that night, all those years ago.
It was so good to reconnect with each of them.
I was able to send them old Easter pictures of us, dressed up in our Sunday best.
The memories were sweet.

We would go back and forth with messages.
It was a better way to catch up without everything being public on our Facebook walls.
There are no coincidence with God.
Those message threads soon became prayer requests and updates.

And I prayed.
And I was sad to hear of complications that hospitalized the older of the two sisters.
Social media became a way to pray miles apart from each other.
A few days ago, I sent a text to the younger sister just to check in.

I told her that I was praying for her sister.
It was then I learned that as I was praying, her sister breathed her last breath here on earth.
All because two pictures were posted.
Connections were made again as only God could perfectly orchestrate.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
(Isaiah 53:3)

I pray for the families who are left and who are grieving.
The Man of Sorrows, the Lord Jesus, is familiar with our grief and suffering.
Jesus cried at Lazarus’ tomb.
Jesus raised a little girl; Jesus raised a dead man and gave him back to his widowed mother.

Jesus is acquainted with our grief.
We have a Savior who understands suffering.
We have a Savior who suffered Himself.
We have a Savior.

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? (1 Corinthians 15:55)

Death stings.
I do not welcome the thought of going to two funerals one day apart.
However, one day, death will be no more.
One day, death will die.

Death will be defeated by the One who is victorious.
Our Lord Jesus rose from the dead and defeated death.
Death itself will soon be forgotten.
Imagine: no more funerals, no more burials, and no more death.

Amen and Amen!