Kindred Spirits

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”

L.M. Montgomery

Anne of Green Gables was a favourite book of mine growing up. As an only child, I emphasized with Anne’s delight in finding a ‘kindred spirit’ in Diana Barrie. I have been blest over the years with many good and long-lasting friends, some from as far-back as the first day of Grade One. (There was no kindergarten way back then in rural Ontario) And I thought of those friends as being kindred spirits, and so they were and still are.

But in the last decade I have had the awe-inspiring experience of meeting not one, but two people who I knew immediately were kindred spirits. In both cases I felt immediately that we had gossiped over the back fence for all of our lives. They were just that familiar. I felt like I had known them forever. While I have seen one of these people fairly frequently since meeting them, the other I only saw for the second time this past week. In both cases any onlookers would think we had known each other for our whole lives. This puts a whole new spin on kindred spirits. As with the experiences of ‘grace’ that I talked about last week, there was an intuitive ‘knowing’ of the other; a caring, an understanding, an ability to hear what they are saying. Perhaps a miracle…. However you might want to label the experience, it goes right along with the moments of ‘grace’ as some of the most powerful moments of my life. I can certainly understand how some people explain such occurrences as reincarnated spirits that were familiar to you in past lives because reincarnation is certainly one way to explain this. Others might say I have an over-active imagination or one glass of wine too many.

But what if this experience is a foreshadowing of how we are meant to relate to everyone we meet. What if this is really what is meant by the phrase in the Bible...“so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” [Romans 12.5 NRSV]

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NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

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