Old Friendships / New beginnings

​By Joyce Pelletier
 
Acts 2:42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
 
Recently, I was able to reconnect with an old friend from when we started our journey with Jesus in 1975. Martha and Dan lived less that a half a mile from us. I don’t remember how we first met. I do recall that we had an instant friendship.
We attended a Marriage Encounter Weekend as did Martha and Dan. This weekend was a weekend for couples to reconnect with each other by means of letter writing to each other. Maurice and I were so blessed by this weekend’s dynamics. I had just made a commitment to follow Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. My life started to change so fast and the benefits of living the life with God was amazing to experience what God was doing in our lives.
Martha and Dan were part of this experience. We lived in the same neighborhood, they had one daughter at the time and soon they welcomed a new son, Jimmy. They asked us to be Godparents to Jimmy. It was our first encounter for this role.
Over the years, we spent many gatherings together until in 1979, we moved to So Woodstock, VT.  We soon, lost touch with them.
Years passed and Jimmy ended up in the military and I tried to reconnect with him, more to encourage him on this role in the armed forces. I never received any response back. Years later Martha and Dan had many more children and they ended up divorced and we lost total contact with them.
My last contact was about 20 years ago, when Dan called and wondered why we didn’t try to contact Jimmy. I told him I had written to him, but never received a response. He was somewhat angry because he wanted to know why we didn’t try to contact him and find out where Jimmy was. Truth be told, we didn’t know where Dan was, so we were in the same boat. Our phone call ended rather abruptly.  I  wasn’t angry, just disappointed and bewildered that he didn’t understand or accept my answers.
A few weeks ago, Dan found a way to contact us. He called and left a message and because it was on my land line, which I rarely used or checked messages, I came across it and returned his call. We talked for about forty-five minutes. The conversation was all different. He was no longer angry. We shared openly back and forth and started emailing, where we could share more. We found we all learned a lot in life and had similar encounters with Jesus.
Acts tells us that the new believers rallied together and became church family. Our early journey was like that. Dan and I shared what that meant to us and after recognizing the importance of having a church family. We tried for years to find that church family. The moment we walked into Daybreak in 2008 we knew we found us in the middle of ‘church’ family. It’s been a long road from Springfield, but I’m so grateful that God never gave up on us, neither will we give upon Him.