Departures

I’ve been thinking a lot about departures lately. Over the next few weeks I’ll be spending time in lounges specifically designed for those who are departing. Their entire purpose is summed up in their name: departure lounge.

My favourite restaurant in Wellington has recently closed. To be sure, it served fine food and its service was second to none. But Il Casino had a much stronger emotional connection to me than just great pasta and fine wine. The first time I ever went into Il Casino was for a funeral. Well, kind of.

It was a funeral where the person who was departing was still there. Graeme was dying of terminal cancer and he invited all his friends – including his new friends, like me – to celebrate his life, share stories and shed tears.

I shed a lot of tears that night. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with one of New Zealand’s richest men that evening. He was a friend of Graeme’s too – or, rather, his wife was, but she couldn’t be there, so he came. And he told me, as he started to cry, about his father who had died of Cancer many years before. For half an hour I heard about his father, the relationship he had with him and we talked about suffering and death – you know, the big questions of life, not material possessions but questions of a much higher order.  

Graeme died not long after that evening. And now that restaurant is closed. With its closure departs one of the strongest associations I had with this man I met as we lay in our respective hospital beds over six days only six weeks earlier.

Departures are often tinged with sadness – we’re saying farewell to the past, we’re closing off chapters, we’re moving on. That’s the whole point of departing of course – we’re on our way to somewhere else.

So departures are only meaningful inasmuch as there’s arrival. And during the past week, as I’ve been slowed down with the flu, I’ve had a lot of time to think and reflect. And one of the things I’m reflecting a lot on is one of the greatest arrivals in all of history. Eugene Peterson renders it as God moving into the neighbourhood. John’s Gospel tells us the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. However you phrase it, it’s an arrival to celebrate. God came to us. Jesus dwelled with us. God arrived and we beheld his glory.

There will many more occasions where I’ll mourn the departures of people and places. There will many more conversations I will have with people about the big questions of life. And they’ll be many times I won’t have answers to those questions. They’ll be many times departures will be amongst the most difficult things I will ever have to do. But we depart in order to arrive somewhere.

I hope that every day I arrive at that place where I met the God who moved into my neighbourhood, who offers me friendship, belonging and hope, and a reason to continue the journey, no matter how difficult it may become.

I’d happily depart to find that place of arrival any day.