Following up from yesterday, the group started gathering Friday afternoon and the festivities began.  We arrived early Friday evening and the laughter and catching up began in earnest.  Before we knew it the clock said it was 1:45am, WAY past some of our normal bedtimes.   So it was off to bed with all looking forward to a full day on Saturday.

As the weekend progressed and folks began finding time to talk and share individually, it started to emerge that we were all there to recover something that had been too long neglected.  It also struck me that at this point in our lives, we had come to realize what really mattered most.

Over these past twenty years we had all had professional success.  From being business owners, to upper level executives, we had experienced the successes of the business world.  However, it also became clear that we had all paid a very high price personally and seen how this success, with its status, perks and trappings could enslave you and then suddenly vanish like the illusion that it is.

We talked about how God seemed to want to get our attention and teach us some important lessons about what truly matters in life. We all had to spend some time in the desert, experiencing pain and loss to bring us to that place.  One of the lessons that we all learned was that our relationships are what truly sustain us.  First our relationship with Father God, then our relationship with our family, finally our relationship with our friends.

We talked about the blessings of our wives.  All of us had wives who were rock solid there for us during those hard times and who stood by us and believed in us when we were struggling to believe in ourselves.

I think we all realized that really its the people in our lives that matter most.  Through the pain we had all experienced, I think we  felt God telling us that our relationships must be attended to and that we would finally realize the incredible gift we had in these long and deep relationships of almost fifty years.

We were all blessed with the awareness that our relationships are what will endure.  We prayed and thanked God for teaching us this lesson and committed to not take this BIG blessing for granted ever again.

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There are times in our life when God provides us with blessings beyond our expectations.  Sometimes they are just small things that happen during the course of the day like when a meeting goes better than expected. How about when the traffic lights somehow are in sync seem to go green  for you just as you approach them…don’t ya love it when that happens?

Then there are the BIG blessings…the ones that rock your world and you can’t stop thinking about them and praising God.  I was blessed with one of those mountain top blessings this past weekend in the form of a gathering of old friends, most of which I had not seen in over ten years and a couple almost twenty.  These were my first friends from the elementary and junior high school years…the guys from my first home church back in St. Louis.

As we arrived throughout Friday evening and Saturday morning each greeting was so sweet.  Although we all had put on few lb’s or gone to the “gray” side, no one had changed all that much. We just started talking and it was comfortable and fun from the get go.  Felt kind of like the many times this exact group gathered at one of our houses years ago on Friday night for a wild and wooly overnight.  One of the guys reminded us that we were all together on the night of the first moon landing.

What was so amazing as well was that during the past three years or so all five of us has gone through a really hard work related loss.  All of us had been successful in our careers however,  to a man, we all had dealt with something very hard.  After a couple of phone conversations and realizing this, the felt need to get together was powerful and thankfully one of the guys had the perfect place for us to retreat.

I will talk more tomorrow about the lessons learned and what I took away from this most incredible weekend.

Blessings!

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