One of the gifts I have inherited in this life is an ease with meeting people. My father was a great one for striking up a conversation with a stranger. He was genuinely interested in people and often could get them to talk about themselves. I am probably just a little bit more shy, and was often a bit embarrassed at my dad’s brashness, especially when I was a teen. But I’m glad that I did spend so much time with him and that I did learn from him not to be fearful around others. In my life I have a lot of acquaintances. I meet people, sometimes have very intense relationships with them, and then we move on with our lives. For examples, there are families who shared very intimate details of their lives with me as we planned the funeral of a loved one. We felt close to each other. I was allowed to minister to them in their time of grief. A few years later, however, we don’t spend much time together at all. Some couples whose marriages I celebrate allow me to witness the unfolding of their families. I baptize the children born to them, watch those children grow up, celebrate communion, confirmation and graduations with them and remain close to the family. Other couples I rarely see after their wedding day.

Through my work in the community, I serve on boards and committees with a lot of different people. I’ve worked side by side with Jews and Muslims, Hindus and people who would claim no religious affiliation. I’ve worked with people from a wide variety of different ethnic heritages and traditions.

I know a lot of people.

But when I think of the people who are my closest, life-long friends, the number is smaller. This is normal and feels very natural to me. I’m happy with the friends I have and feel loved and supported by them. Some of my friends know me better than some of my siblings.

We got to talking, recently, about reconnecting with former friends. We could come up with several stories of people we know who attended reunions - usually school reunions - and reconnected with someone from their past in a meaningful way. We could name a couple of marriages that grew out of relationships rekindled at reunions. It is common, but it seems a bit strange to me. Then again, I’ve never been much for reunions. I attended one all-school reunion of my high school, and have attended three anniversary celebrations of congregations that I served, and that’s about it. I’ve never gone back for homecoming at my college. I’ve never been to a seminary reunion. I’ve nothing against those events. They just don’t attract me enough to become priorities for my time.

The people from my past who are closest to me now are people with whom I’ve maintained relationships over the years. Of course I have the advantage of having met my wife when I was a child and dated her when we were in high school and college, so I’m still best friends with my best friend from those years. But there are other friends from my past with whom I’ve kept up, exchanging letters or e-mails, keeping in touch with social media, and seeing one another when we have the opportunity. Others have drifted away.

The closest I can come to reunion reconnection stories in my life is that there are some people who were part of the churches we served in North Dakota who participate in the church we serve today. There were ten years between those two calls when we lived in Idaho. We might not have seen any of those people during those ten years. When we came to South Dakota there was some reconnection.

It is probably true of most people, but I have a much broader and diverse collection of acquaintances than my group of friends. My friends tend to have a lot in common. For example, thinking of my closest friends, there is a connection with the church for each one. Some are not active in the church today. Some have never been of the same denomination as I. Somewhere in our stories, however, the church played a big role in our meeting and getting to know one other. So, while I have acquaintances of other religions, my closest friends and I have connections to the Christian church.

If this way of forming relationships is common, and I have no reason to think that it is not, it helps to explain why some of the world’s most entrenched conflicts are so difficult to bring to peace. We tend to become closest to people with whom we have much in common. We tend to be more distant from those with greater differences. In Palestine, Christians and Jews and Muslims need to live in very close proximity. They don’t have to be friends, but it would hurt in their struggle to form a civil society and a solution to the generational violence that is entrenched in their communities.

Jesus seemed to be especially gifted at reaching across the divides that separate people. He would spend time with Jews and Gentiles. He would perform miracles of healing with his own people and with their enemies. The gospels tell story of story of his crossing from one group to another carrying the message of God’s love. As disciples of Jesus, we share a call to reach across the divisions of our world.

I need to work harder at being a friend to those who are very different from me.

In that challenge, however, my attention is not focused on going back. It is on going forward and reaching out to those in the community where I live right now. Now is a good time in my life to push myself out of my comfort zone of familiar acquaintances into genuine relationships with those who see things differently than I.

Perhaps for me the connection is more important than the reunion.

I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.