The girls brought home their yearbook this week. They’ve spent time going through pictures, showing me where they end up in the yearbook and pictures of their friends and teachers.
It makes me think of my collection of yearbooks in the guest room, gathering dust. Pictures there too of people that had been close, pictures of myself from ages ago, pictures of favorite teachers.
Yearbooks are funny things. For those of us that are older than a 4th grader, they remind us of relationships past. They remind us of who we loved, who we laughed with, perhaps even who our rivals were. But for those of us that are older than a 4th grader, most of those relationships are set firmly in the past. I’ve lost track of some of the people that I would have called best friend in those yearbook pages, having not talked to them in ages, and unsure how I would even contact them even in an age of internet.
Of course there are a few, a few people that I have stayed in touch with since those yearbook photo days. They aren’t necessarily the people I would have even predicted back then – but there are a few. A few that I can say I know now, a few that I can say that our relationship is current, contemporary.
In some ways, our yearbooks stand as reminders to us that relationships can go stale. This is no less true with our relationship with God. This is not due to God’s part in the relationship, but to ours. We can lose track of Him, fail to keep up with Him. We can fail to read His Word, to gather with His Body, to encounter Him in the sacraments and in prayer. We can start to feel like God was that person who signed our yearbook, but we don’t know Him anymore.
Still God promises to meet us, to reunite with us. He holds a class reunion for us every Sunday, a place where we can gather together with Him and all those whom He has saved. He will meet us there, He will meet us in prayer, He will meet us in His Word. He doesn’t want to let this relationship become simply a yearbook entry, but a living breathing relationship. May it always be so for you.