While I have some time, I want to come back as promised to some reflections resulting from the Canada trip. As the name suggests, this one is about friendship. We made a lot of new friends during our five week stay in the GTA Greater Toronto Area and beyond, as well as catching up with well established friendships from before.
Friendships seem to come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and different dynamics. Some are developed over several years and especially in childhood, you literally grow up together. Most of the friendships I had in my early life faded after we moved from Dundee to Inverness, but some have been reignited along the way. The growing up friendships I have are with a small group of the boys from school, who still like to meet up when we all happen to be in the same town on special occasions. Within that there are the really close confidante relationships where you share a lot in common, in my case its even the same name. With these relationships, you get to know each other as you go along and as they begin when you're very young, you can look back on the past with common memory. When you meet people and develop a close friendship as adults, you usually have to rely on stories from each other to build the picture of past memories and the road they've travelled to get to where they are.
In the case of Chris & Sarah, we met when they were in Scotland, and perhaps because we grew up on opposite sides of the world, it was more of an interest to swap stories about childhood and school days, but for the most part these were just that, stories, we had no shared experience of them. However, just before Chris & Sarah went home three years ago, we went to the Scottish Open in Carnoustie and stayed with Laura's folks in Arbroath. We had the chance to show them where Laura grew up, meet her family and especially visit and walk round the church where we were married.
So one of the highlights of our trip was to do the same with them in reverse. We experienced a Sunday service in the church they were married in, Sarah's home town, and even the house she grew up in and the places both of them visited as children for holidays. We also got to catch up with their family who had visited in Scotland, but also some who we hadn't met before. A particularly special moment was being able to walk around the Christian Camp in Blind River where they fell in love as leaders, and as if that wasn't special enough, on our last night we saw the exact spot where they first met by a hotdog stand and later where Chris proposed at Union Railway Station in Toronto's downtown core.
So the gaps are now filled and we can now relate to the experience of their memories. We experienced so many wonderful things and people in Canada and it's amazing to think that it all springs from Chris & Sarah deciding to come along to an Alpha Course at Hilton church nearly six years ago, for the purpose of meeting new people in the church. We're so glad they did, and also that we decided that was the right time for us to explore our fatih further. To begin with we connected individually, then as two couples and now of course as two families as well. To wax Theological for a second, you might say that it's a trinitarian reflecting friendship. Thanks so much guys for sharing your lives with us as you have, we're arleady counting down till we might see you again!!
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