lifeasmission

Huge Little Things

June 26, 2005

I spent last week at Pelee Island. It is a small island on the Canadian side of Lake Erie. After 2 generations worth of vacationing up there at a cottage owned by friends of the family, my grandparents finally went ahead and bought a cottage right down the road from our friends last summer. There is something magical about Pelee. At some point on the 2 hour ferry ride or the 15 minute plane trip over all stress and worry evaporates and all you are left with is cerenity. Life slows to a crawl as the dirt roads don’t permit you to drive any faster than 35 mph, cell phones don’t work, there’s no cable television, no Internet, and only a couple hundred people (at peak times) sprawled over an island which is 3-4 miles wide and 7-8 miles long.

My high school friend Ken went up with me for the weekend and we had a great time catching up and entertaining each other. Ken is one of those friends who, no matter how long we haven’t seen each other or talked to one another, we can pick up right where we left off. Plus, he is just a riot and we always have a great time together.

For example, we visited the island tavern, “The Westview” (guess which direction it faces?), to shoot some pool. In the space of a couple hours we managed to offend ever Canadianin the place, never purposely mind you, by laughing at their money – the one and two dollar coins are calles Loonies and Toonies respectivcely, playing Born in the USA on the Jukebox, and taking 10 bucks off to two drunk Canadians that just had to play us in a game of pool.

Ken had to come home on Sunday and I spent the rest of the week with my grandmother who is staying up there by herself for the summer since my grandfather passed away last Christmas. We had a great time together talking, running errands, doing little projects around the cottage and just being together.

I came home this past Friday since I think I’ll take probably two more trips up there this summer and because there was so much I wanted to be doing back here.

Last night the guys renting my house in Jackson had a cookout and we had a bunch of friends over as well as some past and present students from the youth ministry at RiverTree. I am inclined to say something like “It was just like the good old days,” but it was so much greater than that. The coolness of last night is that it was new. I was creating new memories with old friends as well as new ones. I guess I am just trying to say that after being away from home for a year a have a hightened appreciation for the evolution of relationships. We cooked stuff on the grill, threw a frisbee, made a run to a new Sheetz (you have to make it a point to visit one of these if you never have – I highly reccommend the Orage Cream Slush!), watched a movie and fell asleep. It really was a great evening.

This morning I visited The Chapel in North Canton to pay a visit to their newly highered junior high youth pastor, Scott Calhoun, who I played soccer with and shared a room freshman year with at Malone. I am reall excited for him. I also got to see Tom and Jane Maurer who hosted me at their home when I interned at The Chapel in North Canton back in college.

I guess all this stuff kind of seems like small things, but they are also very huge in a very real way. I am really swept up in the idea of conceptualizing our lives at part of God’s Grand Story and therefore the way our stories unfold and interweave with one another takes on a tremendous amount of significance for me. Most of the ordaniriness of life seems more profound and everything seems less and less inconsequential Man, I kind of sound like someone who is dying. Maybe that’s because people sadly never figure out what it means to live until they realize it’s too late? Thank God for the grace he shows us to be awakened unto this kind of life and this way of living!

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