Thursday, May 13, 2010

Praying for Sydney

and no, not the city in Australia.

We got news from England the other day - our friend Sydney has been diagnosed with cancer of the spine. He's doing well right now, all things considered. He's in hospital quite some distance from home, and from his non-driving wife, Dorothy, so that's hard on all concerned, but he's largely back to being himself, now the pain is under control. He's schmoozing the nurses, trading chocolate mints for favours and so forth.

Clearly, he and Dorothy and all their family are in our prayers (and we'd be more than happy were you to add them to your prayer list as well), but this got us to thinking about how quickly people can become the closest of friends.

We first met Sydney and Dorothy in 1994, and in the intervening years, we've spent a grand total of nearly two weeks together. It's frankly remarkable to think that even after the first visit of a couple days, we were fast friends - corresponding (fairly) regularly between our pentannual visits, and one longer (a full week!) visit off-schedule a couple years back.

Sometimes it simply doesn't take much time for a real connexion to be made. [Right, Heidi?]

Whenever and wherever you find friendships:
Treasure them.
Honour them.
Celebrate them.