Re-Union

When I was a little girl,

I stood beside my mother

beneath the clothesline

in our backyard.

She reached for the line.

I reached for the clothespins.

One by one,I placed them in her hand

as she hung the freshly washed clothes

and we talked about ordinary things.

One morning,

she said something

that did not seem ordinary at all.

She told me that

my little brother and I

would one day become

the patriarch and matriarch

of our family.

Impossible, I thought.

There were three grown brothers

and an older sister before us.

They were the adults.

We were the children.

But years have a way

of taking us to places

we once could not imagine.

And now, decades later,

Mother’s prophecy

has proven true.

Recently,

I invited the family to come.

for a family reunion.

Some flew in from distant states.

Some drove hundreds of miles.

Some had not seen one another for years.

Some had never met at all.

I wondered.

Would the distance between us

be measured only in miles?

Would we still know

how to be family?

But then they came.

We talked.

We laughed.

We remembered.

We ate together.

And very quickly,

the distance caused by

geography and time

grew smaller.

As I watched it happen,

I began thinking about the word

Reunion.

We say it so easily

that we seldom stop to consider

what it actually means.

Re-union - To become united again.

It means something deeper than

occupying the same house,

standing together for a photograph,

or sharing a meal.

And as I looked around

at the youngest among us,

another thought came to me.

Re-union is not necessarily

a return to something

that once was.

Sometimes

it is the beginning

of something new.

For some,

it is the discovery

of connections

they never knew before.

For others,

it is the chance

for bonds that have long been waiting

to finally grow.

Families are complicated.

We do not choose

the family into which we are born,

or the family into which we marry.

We inherit one another.

We carry pieces of one another

without even knowing it.

Names and faces.

Stories and memories.

Laughter and sorrow.

Old wounds and new beginnings.

And beneath all the differences,

all the years,

all the miles,

there remains a quiet truth:

We belong to one another.

Families are like

those clothespins I once placed

into my mother’s hand.

One by one,

we find our place 

on the line that stretches

from one generation to the next.

Some close together.

Some separated by distance.

Some weathered by years

of sun, wind and rain.

Generations come and go,

but the line continues,

stretching from those

who came before us

toward those

who are still to come.

And somehow,

the matriarchs and patriarchs,

the brothers and sisters,

the cousins and in-laws,

the stepchildren and babies -

each of us holds

part of the family’s story.

The reunion

brought us together

across miles and years.

Doors opened.

Places were made at the table.

Stories were remembered.

New stories began.

And somewhere in the midst of it all

was a simple invitation:

“Come”

There is something of Christ

in that word.

A welcome.

A place at the table.

A drawing near to

those who have been far away.

Perhaps that is enough.

For by the grace of God,

what time has scattered

can still be gathered.

What has grown distant

can still draw near.

And what we thought

was just a reunion

can become something more:

a remembering

of who we are,

where we come from,

and how deeply

we belong

to one another.