One special sauce in our family gatherings is the laughter that bursts when stories are told. Often the biggest laughs come at my expense and my many foibles. It gets noisy and raucous but all the “inside jokes” give us a sense of belonging together – we are all in on the joke. 

Victoria Day vs Ascension Sunday was one of the competitions we enjoyed this past weekend. While the church here and around the globe was celebrating Jesus’ ascension we had our peculiar 2-4 Weekend which kicks off our hopes for summer and its recreations.  

Friendship can place us in tricky and sticky places. Over my decades offering spiritual friendship too often I have been invited into times of failure and embarrassment as friends have misused money, power, or sex.  But friendship isn’t just for happy times; it’s for the dark times where truth spoken in love is crucial.

Some things belong beside one another in the same picture. Ice cream and chocolate cookies, bacon and eggs, a waterfall and the rainbow spray, a mother and freshly swaddled infant … and you can make your own list because your creativity is likely freer than mine. 

The river, swollen with spring runoff, roared in torrents over the rapids heading down the next stage of its travels. Most of the water flowed straight ahead but some in the narrowed channel at the rapids’ base swirled back around in complex patterns. Edges of the flow tested the banks for openings to move around trees and grassy areas on the floodplain. On a retreat with a few friends during a morning time of reflection I sat for an hour watching all this.