THERE IS NO FOREVER

Christmas and summer vacation are the child's first experience with joy followed by loss. The good stuff never seems to last. Then as we grow we keep learning the same lesson. Although maybe with some different images: The change of the seasons, the passing of those we love, the end of the world we knew.

Christianity has this way of making the lesson more bearable. Actually more embraceable. It speaks of Good Fridays always followed by Easter Sundays.

While it's easy to feel the regrets in our Good Fridays, not anywhere near as easy to envision the resurrections in our Easter Sundays. Still, those Sundays do come. Especially when you believe. Belief, though, comes hard when all around you keeps changing, disappearing, dying. A sinking feeling particularly felt as you age and accumulate so many more people and things you want to hang on to forever. But there is no forever. At least not here.

Right now, so many many Good Fridays. Plants closing...jobs disappearing...opportunities drying up. Old-time stand-bys like newspaper boys...milk men...librarians...gas station attendants...video stores...front porches and safe schools hard to find. Not to mention dining rooms...over-the-backyard-fence talks...house calls...teenage dating...labor unions...and the entire middle class almost nowhere to be found.

But here's the thing. Between Good Fridays and Easter Sundays we have the Saturdays during which to gradually let go of what's been lost, in the expectation of something better to follow. Quick fact check..! That isn't likely to take place cheering at some pumped-up-be-your-dream seminar or exhilarating at some tai chi group exercise or channeling your rage into some heady alternative like a Tea Party.

Most of the world's survivors have a much different story to report. First , you take the time to grieve what you lost, to value what it did for you, then realize what it failed to do for you. Now, but only now, can you look to Sunday as a new resurrection, a new beginning, a new new for which we've all been waiting even without always knowing it.

Sorta like the day I lost my heart to the Joan who had always been waiting. Even without either one of us knowing it.