I had a lovely surprise yesterday in combination with a really weird coincidence.  I have an old friend, as in one that I have known for a long time, although admittedly, he is getting on a bit.  I met him at church when I was at University in Leeds in the early 1980’s and up until the last few years, I have kept in touch with him and seen him reasonably regularly.  But since moving up here to Northumberland, I have sort of lost touch.  We send Christmas cards, and he visited us once about 5 years ago, but other than that we haven’t really had much contact with him, much to my shame.

However, over the last few weeks, I’ve been feeling that I should contact him and get him to visit us.  As it happens, I am on business in Leeds next week, and am staying over for the night in a hotel not that far away from where my friend lives.  So I decided I would ring him and see if he was available to go for a meal and catch up.

The thing is, and this is what is really weird, I was going to ring him last night, but he rang me before I actually got round to it.  I haven’t spoken to him for years, and he rings me on the same evening I was going to ring him – how about that for a strange coincidence!

But wait, it gets even stranger…..

The reason he rang was because at his church in Leeds the day before he’d had the opportunity to talk with a visitor who was just moving into Leeds to start a new job.  It turns out that this visitor had previously been in the youth group at our church in Morpeth when I was leader a number of years ago.

So my friend rang me to tell me that he had met someone who knew me. I know it can be a bit of a cliche, but sometimes it really does feel like we live in a ‘small world’.

Anyway, the good news is that my old friend is coming to visit us in Northumberland in a few weekends time.  How good is that?  It will be great to see him and catch up on what has been happening in our lives since we were last together. Life is busy for all of us and it’s so easy to lose contact with people – but isn’t it great when you get back in touch with a friend that maybe you haven’t heard from for a while?

How about you?  Do you have any old friends that you haven’t seen for a while?  Maybe you should contact them, because you never know what blessing might come with it.