By wisdom a house is built;
    by understanding it is established.
 By knowledge rooms are filled
    with all precious and pleasant wealth.

Proverbs 24:3-4

Dateline Folkestone, England - 1973: It's the end of November and I am walking home from school after a cold, wet, rainy, muddy soccer game. The sidewalk is slippery, covered with soggy leaves, and a chill damp wind is coming in off the English Channel. As I approach the corner of Avereng Road I hear a joyful barking followed by a loud "THUMP!" as my Golden Retriever, Lassie, hits the garden fence at full speed. I am still wet, I ache from a few hard tackles, and the wind is beginning to bite. But I love this time of the year; not just the fresh invigorating air but because I know my mum is waiting in the kitchen. There will be baked-beans on toast, a hot cup of tea, and maybe some rice-pudding. She will be ready to hear all about the hat-trick I scored and kind enough not to ask anything about my homework....

Tuesday in Wake Forest was cold and overcast, featuring constant drizzle intermittently turning into light rain. All day. The temperatures barley reached 60 but it felt closer to 45. It was, in a word, dreary.

But I loved it. I kind of felt like Br’er Rabbit and his briar patch. “Throw me in, throw me in,” I thought; “this place feels exactly like home!”

I don’t know what it is but I have been feeling tugs like that all week. Sunday morning our organist played a medley of hymns during the offering, and each one of them landed me squarely back at Folkestone Baptist on Rendezvous Street. I found myself singing along – “I’ve found a friend O such a friend, he loved me e’re I knew him….”, “Jesus is all the world to me….” “What a friend we have in Jesus….”

Maybe it’s my mum. Probably. Tapping on the edges of my memories, trying to remind me what all those years meant, helping me remember who it really is that we have lost.

I was talking about this with a friend over coffee in the morning. Sometimes the last year or so with a parent can be so difficult that the person who passes away is in a sense disconnected from the one who raised you, the one you loved so much for 20, 30, 40, 50… 67 years. Then, later, after a few weeks maybe or months go by, things happen and everything becomes clear again. That’s when the grief takes on a new shape – along with the gratitude – because you remember exactly who it is that you lost.

So a cold clammy Englishesque November day joins forces with the lyrical phrasings from a few hymns, combined with a cup of tea, and a very British biscuit (cookie)… and here come the tears, welling up in my heart when I least expect them and eventually, quietly, leaking out from my eyes.

And – sigh – it is not even Christmas yet.

Those who love the most may well have to grieve the most too; but in the process they also discover they have something – a lot actually – they will never ever really lose.

So I am grateful for dreary wintery days, and sloshing in the rain, and wet Golden Retrievers, and old hymns, and good memories, and the sure knowledge that real love and authentic faith never go away they just fill you up until they spill over – sometimes leaking, quietly, from the corners of our eyes…

In love, and because of love – DEREK