What if we could make a Mosaic of our Hearts' Best Moments?

     I love mosaics. I love the little pieces coming together to shape and form a bigger picture. I love the colors, separate and then joining together, something bigger, brighter, better.

     What if all of your friends pictures were joined together in one big mosaic? What would that do to your heart?  And what would it look like if this mosaic could hold your life story? Tapestry? One long book with many chapters? One long album with melody after melody after melody?

     Working in hospice, I go to many, many funerals. And I’m often touched by clergy, family and friends trying so very hard to tell us all the stories of the person’s life. It’s often wonderful, sometimes endless, always tender. Words fall short of a lifetime. But words are what we have.

     Facebook has done a great kindness in its re-connecting of so many friends. From grade school to just yesterday, friends gather. White Horse is my way to engage. What’s amazing to me is when my Mattoon friends interact with my Candler friends, when my St. John friends chat it up with my KD sisters. It’s overlapping a lifetime in real-time.

     So I’ve been wondering about using colors and shapes instead of words to hold a picture of my Friendship Mosaic. It’s comforting to me to try to imagine the personalities. Besides Claud and Bets, Tracey was probably my very first friend. Or were the Dougherty’s who lived on the same block? Or Polly who I remember meeting in 1st grade. And who’s been my most recent friend? Would it be Carla and Rendi at work? Or Wade and Burt at church?

     Every now and then it’s life-affirming to stop and think about the different friends I’ve had throughout my life. Kindergarten to college; sorority and seminary; work and church; friends for football and friends for Saturday mornings; friends for the dark nights of the soul and friends who stay awake with you to wait for the coming of the sunrise. And then there are our parents’ friends, our partner’s friends, our kids’ friends, our pets’ friends.      

     And don’t get me started on the notion of making a mosaic of your 10 favorite sunsets, or days at the beach, or book covers, or albums from college days, or favorite movie posters, or sneakers, or front doors of houses you’ve lived in…what pictures we could create. Let’s get started, you want to?

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