"Some Days are Diamonds"

“Now the face that I see in my mirror,

more and more is a stranger to me.

More and more I can see there's a danger

in becoming what I never thought I'd be.

Some days are diamonds, some days are stone.

Some times the hard times won't leave me alone.

Some times the cold winds blow a chill in my bones.

Some days are diamonds, some days are stone.”

(Lyrics from Some Days are Diamonds by John Denver)

Two things happened in my life on the same day not long ago. Two things that were both very different, yet the same. Although one was a diamond and the other a stone, it was the first line of this song that came to me “Now the face that I see in my mirror, more and more is a stranger to me” because they both involved not the face I now see in the mirror everyday, but the face I used to see 50+ years ago.

On sending an e-card to wish one of my best friends from back then a ‘Happy Birthday”, I received a note back from her saying in part “Ah, you got my taste absolutely accurately!…” As I read her response I was thinking that it was the same card I might have picked for her those 50+ years ago.

The second thing was an email from the wife of someone I had gone all through school with saying that he had succumbed to cancer just a few days earlier. Although I knew he had been ill, the bottom seemed to fall out of my world for a moment and I felt a deep sense of loss.

I have had minimal contact with both these people since leaving high school, a couple of high school reunions and in the last few years a coupe of girls’ lunches and a couple of email comments about this blog. “Now the face that I see in my mirror, more and more is a stranger to me” The faces I saw in the mirror of my mind were the faces from 50+ years ago. The feelings I was experiencing belonged to those faces. That was, and is, my reality.

Yes, I have changed over the intervening years in many ways, but that which is the ‘real’ or authentic me has not changed. In a very real sense ‘I’ am the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. Both John Denver’s song and my experience point to the truth of this line from the Bible ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.’ [Hebrews 13.8] It speaks to the human condition.

I remember my mother saying to me that when she passed a mirror she wondered who that old woman was, because it wasn’t her. Now I appreciate what she was trying to tell me!

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