Murray and I were having a deep-chat-in-the-kitchen-over-tea the other night. I was saying to him (not to be morbid or anything) that we will only ever be each other’s top priority.

Meaning:

Eventually, we’ll be no one else’s top priority. Friends tend to ebb and flow, over a lifetime. Parents pass on. Siblings have their own families. Kids grow up and leave home and start their own families too and that’s how it should be. But, until one of us is dead and the other is wearing nappies in a frail care, we will still be life fellows. (And everything up until the wearing-nappies point of life should be considered the wonder years.)

(Seriously, I wasn’t trying to be morbid.)

Deduction:

If I’m not making Murray my top priority now (and vice versa), then there won’t be much of a friendship left to prioritize when our boys are grown and gone. So we make a point of stealing moments in fractured, busy days to hug and make ridiculous jokes and have how-was-your-day conversations, even though most of our emotional energy is sucked into the other two small people who live in our house.

I know all this may strike you as macabre, initially, but I trust that upon closer inspection and contemplation you might find it to be quite lovely and reassuring. Even lovelier and more reassuring is the fact that Jesus, our Alpha and Omega who gives freely from the springs of the water of life (Revelation 21:6), will be there at the very end, too, as he was at our very beginning.