Jack in his blog wrote about the loneliness of joining the church. As our community there grows, and as our worldview changes, it can feel like there’s a real gap between us and the secular people in our lives. As I write that it strikes me as both a cult-like red flag and a gratingly prideful misstep away from Christ’s intention for us to cultivate and understand a more profound agape for every person, wether or not they understand the way that we do. Of course prideful missteps are generally not things we choose consciously.

The sustained love of the people and communities and World we know seems like a worthwhile thing, to me, since I’m not a monk. But doing that while cultivating this new Kingdom, this new community, this new worldview, while in a world that’s not adding any more hours to the existing 24, is not easy.

That effort aside, it’s pretty dang nice that as this deepens, my best friend is there waiting with loads of knowledge and insight and perspective in the way we’ve always shared and share again in a totally new light. 

And as much as I love Jack, the fact that Abby is on this journey with me is just unfathomable. Two close friends of ours from church are now in a courtship, they’re older and found one another in our magical catechuman class. As I think about their courtship within the church it makes me appreciate the guardrails put in place there: pre-marriage counseling, celibacy, the commonality of faith, these are important tools for making sure a relationship is successful. They’re not perfect, but honestly they look pretty damn good when I compare them to what many of my secular friends have put up with.

That Abby and I met eachother a decade ago and have grown and changed as much as we have, and have arrived at this monumental and vast and strange and bizarre and beautiful thing together is just more than I could possibly have ever expected or hoped for. I’m in it every day and it feels impossible. 

So, love you Jack, but Abby? Wow.

I thought about changing the photo for this post to be a picture of us kneeling for our Chrismation, but that feels private.