Met an old friend P for a very overdue cup of coffee today. We have not managed to meet even though I have been back for a few months now. I blamed her moving off to an office in Ulu-sville, and she blamed me for being still a workaholic (she only knew me from the days of practice). After we disabused each other of our respective notions on ulu-ness and workaholism, we did some real time catching up. Closing a gap in the years here. Bridging a memory from the past there. While always pleasant, these catch-up sessions (and I have had a few of these in the last months since returning) can feel like strangly reductionist experiences - all those years of living, loving, hurting, growing - compressed into an hour- long coffee session. You know you can't really take your conversation partner back to live the past with you, simply because they were just not there. So we smile and nod and say how things have changed and how they have not.But I was completely unprepared for what happened next. I realized that sometimes, the passage of time crosses over separate lives, with us completely unaware of what has gone on in another person's life.
We were joined by P's friend whom I have not met - a pleasant-faced unadorned lady in a simple suit with mid length hair. When she went to collect her coffee. P said to me, "She's the reason why I have been so busy."
In the next 20 minutes, the three of us chatted normally enough about practice, and skiing, and stuff.
Skipping past all the [necessary or unnecessary] feelings of surprise, puzzlement etc. (this is actually the first time anyone has made the "confession" to me), which I am telling myself to process only after P and I find another occasion to talk in private (like Broccoli Man advises, do not try to reinterprete her, or rather, my memory of her), one thought stuck in my mind all this evening.
The hunger for love is strong indeed.
Not just in P. Also in old schoolmate who took up an overseas posting early this year without her husband to give herself "space" in her 10-year marriage, and who is now re-discovering herself through "the other people" she is meeting. As well as the long-time Christian brother who is, to the great surprise of all of us, now engaged to a non-Christian girl.
The "judgment" part is really superfluous in each case. These are people I know well, and they know well also my position on these things. In every of these coffee sessions, the thing that rings more loudly in the ear than the "confession" is the tacit plea for their need for love to be acknowledged. And how does one not recognize and acknowledge it when it rings so loud? Not just from them but all around in everyone, and within oneself too.
There will come the right time for processing, interpreting, perhaps persuading. But, the question of the evening rings out in the mind still -
How, Lord, does one respond to the hunger for love, which is strong indeed?
