Topic: spirituality
"Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold."
I can still hear my daughter, as a 9-year-old Brownie, singing that song at the top of her voice. Three decades later, she's learned how to do that quite well.
My mother, who grew up in the Great Depression, also does this very well. She recently sent me a picture of herself, at about age 6, along with her sister a year older and a good friend. That good friend still lives near Mother, who is now 82. In fact, my mother wrote recently that she takes her friend to the grocery store and helps her shop, while the friend leans on the grocery cart.
It may be that these two stayed bonded to one place for a large chunk of their growing up years. My mother in a little farm community in Texas, my daughter in Malawi, C. Africa (even though she went away to boarding school, along with some of her friends, perhaps bonding her to them even more). Yet Renita also has a lot of friends left from college. Perhaps because she still lives in the same neighborhood and attends a church across the street from the university, it's easier to keep up with people.
Whatever the reasons, these two keep the old while reaching out to the new in ways that I'll never know.
There is a close parallel that I see between how theology can serve us well as we "make new friends" with emerging concepts while keeping the old concepts that still work from long ago. That's where I'm going, in this blog, starting tomorrow.
