Threads of lives

I first met Angie and her father Dan (not the real names) 40 years ago. Angie was about 10 years old. Her mother had recently died, leaving she and her two siblings as orphans.

Dan had belonged to the church my dad pastored about 15 years earlier and now resumed contact after a long absence. Dan started coming to my dad’s new church and also needed someone to care for the young children during his absence on business trips.

My dad referred Dan to my girlfriend who became the child carer during some uni holidays. That brought me into the scene. A year or so later I needed employment. Dan rang the boss of a firm he has worked for and so I had a job for two years while my life reshaped.

Dan soon married a woman from my dad’s church and then we all drifted in different directions for many years. After Dan became a church elder involved in wider church matters I met him more often. As a young adult, Angie sister was a friend of my wife and I and then, after a gap of decades, we became Facebook friends when she lived in the UK.

Angie’s life had ups and downs, involving tragic moments that tested and tormented she and her family. She died last Friday aged 50. I saw a Facebook message from her sister and rang Dan. Then contacted some other friends who were all part of that church and friendship network about 40 years ago. And so we will soon gather to mourn with those who mourn.

In this the threads of pain and care weave through the Kantian categories of space and time. Or rather, they are woven for it is God who brings people and circumstances in and out of our lives.

Something like this makes me wonder. Angie was a peripheral part of my life yet there are the threads of about 20 people in direct relationship and stretching over about 60 years of my family. And then I think of others whose threads are woven into the tapestry of my life and I in turn woven into that of them and others. There are the known and unknown; the long running and the short-lived; the welcome and unwelcome. The threads of my life are beyond counting and disappear into the mists of time backwards and forwards.

As Donne says: no man is an island. Each of these threads is a person made in God’s image and for whom Christ died. They are an opportunity for me to serve and be served with God’s love and truth.

And so I will keep in touch with Angie’s family through this … and resume contact with other people whose threads have resurfaced through this contact.