Friends

We dug through junk today.  Our church holds a rummage sale every year and the annual sale occurs next weekend, but everyone delivers their unwanted stuff today and tomorrow.  We brought a bunch today.  It feels good to "lighten" up a little.  It feels good not to be so "thingy."  We've been purging stuff for years now, holding our own annual rummage every year for the last 6 years or so.  Today was kind of the last of it.  

Every penny that's made at the church's rummage goes to mission work around the city and around the world. We feel good about that too.  Our congregation is active and vibrant.  Our church is persistently, visibly and joyfully generous.  They relate to each other, they love each other, and they wear congregation's and the city's burdens, joys, concerns, needs, successes and prayers like precious jewelry.  

And so it was that as we purged, we found items and memories that we'll keep, probably forever.  The process of finding the things we could let go of, also revealed many forgotten things that we'll never let go of.  One of them was a poem Monique wrote when she was 10 or 11 years old, her first poem ever.  Monique said it was one of the first things she ever wrote.  Forget about talent, forget about the structure or the meter (does anyone care about Iambic Pentameter when they're ten years old?), forget about grades...she wrote something very personal to her at the time.  Maybe she'd struggled with a friend, maybe she really appreciated her friends.  Maybe she was hurt or betrayed by someone, or maybe someone was very special to her.  No matter what, today we found this little ditty... something she wrote that strikes the heart of where I am right now and where you and I will be in five years, ten years and thirty years from now...she wrote something true to time and age.  She wrote something that even mirrors what our congregation will enjoy doing next week.  At ten years old she wrote a piece that humbles even the most mature man or woman.  Today we thoroughly enjoy our friends.  Today she enjoys her very best friend more than she enjoys most things.  And when she was ten, she knew what that should look like. Glimpse a moment of a single day when a ten year old girl knew how to love the Lord her God with all her heart, soul, mind and strength, and love her neighbor as herself.  On her poem hangs all the laws and the prophets.  Read, and understand the heart of a friend.

A Friend

by Monique Ingrid Huizinga (Elgersma)

A friend is someone special

a friend is someone new.

A friend is someone nice and kind,

especially to you.

A friend is someone who will help.

A friend can be near by.

A friend is always merciful

And their love will (and should) never die.

A friend will help you through your life,

In everything you do.

A friend is always to the best,

and helps you follow through.

A friend will do things for you,

and help and care for you.

A friend will never laugh at you,

when you fail at something new.

A friend.