May 1 – “Forty years”

Already May.  I wonder how many times I will hear that this month?  Not that I would particularly notice it normally, but I did go to my 40th high school reunion last night.  Forty years since I celebrated getting out of high school.  Forty years since I was the skinny, wimpy kid with glasses who loved drama class because he could become someone else.  Of course now I'm not so skinny any more.  I still have those glasses, but they are bifocals, and I've already had my first cataract surgery.  And I'm perfectly fine with who I am since I stumbled on the discovery that the One who made me meant for me to be me.   I talked to one person who asked about my high school yearbook.  We were comparing notes on what we lost in Hurricane Ike.  Sadly, that item was on the list of things gobbled up by the claw from the trash heap in our front yard.  She told me that she actually found one at a garage sale.  Who puts a high school yearbook in their garage sale?  I remembered finding a really old Texas Aggie yearbook at the city dump one time when I worked as a beach trash man for the City of Galveston.  It was really old, so I rescued it.  Lost that one in the storm, too.    It would have been helpful to look through the yearbook before going to that reunion, though.  There were a lot of folks there that I didn't remember.  It was OK, though, because they admitted not remembering me, either.  It's the ones that say they do remember me that make it scary.  I get that a lot, mainly because I'm a pastor.  In fact, as I was walking into the restaurant last night, someone in a truck rolled down her window and yelled at me, "Hey, Pastor Kelley."  I'm not sure who it was, but I grinned and waved back.  Maybe if she reads this she will let me know later it was her.  Anyway, we decided that the ones we really remembered were those we spent time with in junior high and elementary school.  Oh, and I also saw Eric who grew up on my street.  Once we hit high school everyone went their separate ways into the usual high school social networks: jocks and cheerleaders and smart kids and drama people and band members and partiers.   I saw the girl I went out with on my first date ever in junior high school.  My older brother drove us to the Big Dance at the end of the year.  I saw one girl who introduced me to a friend as the "guy who gave me my first kiss."  It was in one of the enclosed stairways of our elementary school.  All the rooms were in building up on stilts, so the stairways were enclosed to keep out the weather.  Second grade.  Guess I was a better player back then than I was in high school.   I spent a long time talking to a guy who never seemed to have a lot of friends back in high school.  He has had a pretty tough life since then.  Lots of family issues.  He said he was a believer, but he didn't really have a specific church family he could turn to.  He doesn't live in Galveston any more, either, so it will be hard to follow up.  I have seen him on FaceBook a few times, though.  Also talked to some others going through tough times – divorce, aging parents, personal pain.    I was kind of surprised when Victor, the really popular guy of the evening who flew back in from Georgia, sat with me to eat.  We were in junior high together, so we fell into that "way back" category.  He was the quarterback of the junior high football team.  I was his fourth string backup.  Just a little perspective.    I heard quite a few "I read your blog" comments.  My favorite of the evening, though, came as I was leaving.  I told them I had to get home and come up with a sermon for Sunday.  Francine mentioned that I could write about "some of us."  And Joanne, ever the funny one, said something along the lines of, "Yeah, say that some of us who started out so weird didn't really turn out so bad."    Not so bad at all, Joanne.  Some of my classmates seemed very much at peace.  Others not so much.  My prayer for all those guys now is that they can be happy.    Isaiah 26:3 says, "You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you."   Father, bring your peace to my old classmates – to those who were my friends and those who never really knew me.  Draw them closer to yourself so it will be possible for them to be truly happy.  Amen.