I recently had a chance to connect with a group of people, some of whom I had not seen for many years. The twenty year anniversary of my high school graduation is this year, and my class comes from a unique place in the world: Papua New Guinea.
I haven’t talked about it much on this blog in a long time, but my family became Christian missionaries when I was sixteen. I had no choice in the matter, and was moved from my home in Norfolk, Virginia, with my sister, across the world to that large island in the South Pacific just north of Australia.
About a year after that, I found myself graduating with a group of about forty other teenagers from a missionary school in the mountain highlands. We all went about forty different ways after graduation. I’ve seen some of my classmates at different times during the intervening twenty years, and some I haven’t seen since the day I left.
This blog isn’t long enough to detail everything that experience, or that those people, mean to me, both good and bad and everything in between. Suffice to say, I will never forget my senior year of high school or the influence it had on my psyche and makeup as a person.
Two weeks ago, some half of the class converged in a small town in rural Georgia to reconnect. Among them are a core group of people I consider my best friends. Again, it is hard to explain in a short form how someone I see only a few times in many years can be a best friend, but something of the crucible of the place where we came of age forged close relationships that will never die. We understand each other in ways that our parents, sometimes siblings, and other friends we have made since, can never comprehend.
We had no activities planned during the weekend we got together, and that turned out to be the best way we could have spent our time. We talked. All weekend, in ever-revolving groups, we talked. One or two people would leave a group, and one or three would join. We would gently pause for meals, and move outside, or go on long walks, but we talked all weekend. Only a small portion of that time is what someone might consider “catching up”. In fact, we started the weekend with a round table where we all took a few minutes to catch up the entire group on where we were in life and what we were doing, but that was only to forestall twenty more or less identical conversations later.
From there, we talked life, growth, family, experiences, reminisced a little, and explored what is important to each of us and to all of us. It was the best few days I have had in a long time. Not just seeing and being around my old compadres, but meeting a few new ones (again, no real time to go into that). Over all, what mattered was our connection to each other, and to a place that, in many real ways, no longer exists (at least, not as we knew it).
It was good to know and to have reconfirmed to me that the ties that bind are as strong as they ever were. We are all twenty years older than high school, and are starting to feel the effects of aging. We didn’t stay up as late as we would have in high school, and we got up later than we used to. We drank more coffee to stay functional, and there were some children around that didn’t exist the last time we met. But we were us. We haven’t lost that in the intervening twenty years.
Leaving was difficult and something I can’t quite put into words. I recaptured something during that weekend that I wish to hold onto. I want to be more intentional about keeping up with my friends, and not just on social media, and I hope it won’t be another twenty years before I see them again. We all have our own families and lives and responsibilities and cares, of course. But like I said, little of that matters to our connection to each other. I want to be intentional about reaching out every so often to them, if nothing else to say “hi, I am here, and I love you, and you mean so much to me”.
Thanks to all of you who have made my life what it has become, and who were around me at a very awkward stage of my life and who didn’t reject me then and who still haven’t rejected me in the twenty years since. I do love you all, and you do mean so much to me. Here’s to you, and let’s keep in real touch. I’ll be calling or emailing some of you soon, and might even be seeing some of you again before the year is out. I can’t wait!
a simple man 