Scrabulous!

I've been enjoying facebook online since Katie went off to college. It's a great way to stay in touch with people with whom you might otherwise fall out of contact. Katie has re-established contact with various friends even from when she was in fifth grade. I, too, have enjoyed the benefit of this phenomenon, such as through contact with a sweet chum of mine who was in 4th grade when I last saw her, Grace. But I wasn't in 4th grade. I was the director of her Awana Chums club! She and her brothers were also involved in a homeschool music ministry along with Katie, a ministry which was attended by Tim for the first time this year. That music ministry has been run all along by Tina Riley, who now attends the Alliance Church in Granite Falls, the sweet tiny church we started attending last year. (We met Tina, and Grace, at our previous church.)
So Grace contacted me after all the four years since she moved away, befriended me on facebook, and invited me to a game of Scrabulous (a form of Scrabble) online, one of the many applications that are available on facebook. Scrabble is one of my favorite games! She almost hooked me right off the bat.
At first I didn't take her up on it, because of the time that it can take to complete a game, and the many other demands I might encounter in a day--but with this type of Scrabble, she told me that it can be finished later. (The nice thing with that, too, is that the game doesn't occupy the table until you can finish it.) She's really quite good at the game, too!
Now I can tell you, I am not too swift at how to IM and do other things at the same time; and then with the game, it has a feature where you can look up potential words you are hoping to use. They open up on another tab (or screen), and it gets a little perplexing if you get a few of these open--which I did. Well, I tried closing a few of those and accidentally closed the game too. So, since the Scrabulous feature doesn't yet show up on my facebook, I didn't know how to get back to it. By that time, my friend Grace had to go off to bed or something, and so we have an unfinished game. No matter. We can do it again at another time. I think I'll practice in the meantime and get all these little techniques down so I don't shut down my end of the game unintentionally again.
I ponder that, though. It isn't just the pleasure of Scrabble, but it's like drawing people residing in Tennessee and Washington together with only a table in between, covered with a game and a bunch of little square wooden letter pieces. It's like picking up from about four years ago, with a girl who's probably changed more than I have, but who is unusually able and willing to reach out from her world into that of an adult she knew what must seem so long ago to her. If our families hadn't attended the same church, or been involved in the same homeschool music ministry at the time, we wouldn't have known each other. Both things were functions of knowing Christ. So Christ is who drew us together to begin with, and He is our Sustainer; every good and perfect gift comes from above...including otherwise unlikely friendships that might have so easily unraveled but for His sustaining power and goodness.