We enjoyed a visit this evening with our friends, Paul & Patty Ellis.  We met Paul and Patty over 20 years ago while we were attending Trinity Baptist Church in Indio.  The Ellises have been missionaries in the Philippines for 25 years now and our paths crossed during one of their home furloughs when we had a couple of their children, Bobby and Peter, in our youth group.

The years have led us on very different paths and yet whenever we sit with them, I am reminded more of our commonalities than our differences.  In recent years, I have been through a number of spiritual trials that have brought me to a different type of faith (although of largely the same brand).  The Ellises have been through many trials of their own and those trials seem to have led them in more traditional paths.  Yet we share the language of our young faith...we share the wiser understandings of the divine and the mundane to which our gray hair attests.

And we share a common interest in leaving this world better for having passed through it, along with a common hope for life beyond this particular, mortal realm.

It was good to break bread with them, to share fellowship.  To listen and to hear.

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