We spend many, many hours with our schoolmates. Calculating 8 hours a day times 180 days on average in a school year times 13 years for a K-12 education, we spend some 18,720 hours with the other students in our class(es). That's basically the same as being with them every minute for two years.
A lot is happening with us and to us in those years between ages 5 and 18, roughly. We are formed in many ways that will endure throughout our lifetimes. After graduation, as the years pass, we may become nostalgic for our school days or our classmates or perhaps both.
In my little hometown in my rural home county I attended a very small school. There were only 39 members of my high school graduating class. Some of those classmates have already died. Some have lost spouses. Some have lived through numerous health crises. Many, like me, have moved away from where we grew up and then moved a number of other times after that.
Most of us are still around. Our numbers will no doubt continue to shrink over the next two decades. We will grow thinner and thinner on the ground. If we want to spend time with each other, we need to get going.
On the fortieth-year anniversary of our graduation we didn't have a reunion. The last reunion we had, in fact, was at the twenty-year mark since finishing high school.
This coming weekend, in this forty-second year since graduation, we will have a Class of 1982 Turns 60 Reunion. I can't wait to see those people I spent so many formative hours with when we were young. I'm so grateful to still be in relationship with them this many years on.
I'm choosing to spend money and energy and time to be with them once more. Without them, I wouldn't have become who I am. Glory to God who uses everything and everyone to lead us to grow into the full measure of Christ.
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