Blogging about this trip to Minnesota is proving to be almost as difficult as blogging about our Initiation into the Catholic Church… and in a way I suppose I understand why.  All but one of the people we met this past week were ’strangers’.  I had talked to a few of them on the Sonlight forums, but had never spoken to them in real life, or met them or their spouses or their children.  In fact, I spoke to the wife of the couple I stayed with for the first time two hours before arriving on Monday.  So to find ourselves on the way home on Wednesday feeling as if we’d been to a family reunion was a bit of a surreal experience.  In fact, it felt like a family reunion of the kind we’ll have when our time in the Shadowlands is over and we are at long last Home.  Therefore it is not only surreal but of a type of joy and contentment to which words do not come easily.

Most of the time, we were 5 adults (Cherie in WI and her dh, Touchstone and Mamadala, and myself) and 13 children (Cherie’s 5, Mamadala’s 4 – not counting those two precious twins on the way, and my 4) but when Rachel44 came over with her family we maxed out at 7 adults and 15 children from age 5 to 14. The children hit it off in minutes. Touchstone spent hours dragging them around the lake on a huge 6 kid tube while the parents took turns giving individual rides to their kids on the jetski’s.  They played games of all kinds, swam in the lake, read books together, went to the Zoo, and any number of other activities.  The adults got to play with the kids, sit and visit with each other, feed the children, and cruise the forums via our laptops from the same kitchen table. Fabulous fun, but woven were the ties that bind and new friends of all ages were made old. When we got ready to leave, all the girls exchanged addresses and promises to write amid hugs and tears. The journey home continued the fun in a somewhat limited fashion via the telling and remembering of many stories, some by kids on grown ups!

Arriving home, we brought with us some of that peace and contentment… and new energy for yet another leg of the journey. Not only that, but those friendships from the forums have a real life dimension to them now that enriches the forum interaction. These friendships in the forums have ’sharpened as iron’ and in person they have done that and more.  To be accepted as one is and wordlessly encouraged to strive ever more to be more like the Lord we all love…  What a precious gift in friends… such a thing is rare indeed, and here, in one fell swoop, are many such ones. 

In the end, I still don’t feel I’ve done the trip justice.  Skirted around it, touched on it a bit, but in the end it defies description… as surely as all those moments when heaven and earth seem to draw close enough to give us vision into the Peaceable Kingdom.