This is a story about a hat and a friend. It will have some tangents.

Last wednesday we left Maastricht for Brussels where we spent a day. I ate waffles with friends in 'grand place.' It was lovely. While there, I purchased a hat. It was an inexpensive black beret. It was nothing out of the ordinary.

The next morning we left Brussels for London. The hat was left behind by accident. I was disappointed.

While in London, we walked a lot. I really enjoyed that part. Truly. I also enjoyed being silly with Tracy (roommate), Aubrey, Bethany, and others. We saw people singing and dancing and acting on a stage at a theatre. Twice. I was a happy girl to have seen Wicked and Les Miserables in one weekend. We- several friends from Baylor and I, that is- also saw truly incredible works of art by people like Van Gogh and Renoir and Degas and others in London's National Gallery. I had read, on the train on the way to London, a book by C.S. Lewis in which he talked about nearness to God. He said that there are two things that could be called nearness to God. "One is likeness to God. God has impressed some sort of likeness to Himself, I suppose, in all that He has made...Secondly, there is what we may call nearness of approach. If this is what we mean, the states in which a man is 'nearest' to God," says Lewis, "are those in which he is most surely and swiftly approaching his final union with God, vision of God and enjoyment of God. And as soon as we distinguish nearness-by-likeness and nearness-of-approach, we see that they do not necessarily coincide. They may or may not." We saw nearness-by-likeness in those paintings. The beauty and care for particular detail that the artists so clearly worked out on canvas reminded me of the beauty and care for particular detail God works out in his creation. It was refreshing. I think encountering new and surprising beautiful things usually is. This nearness-by-likeness made me want the nearness-by-approach even more. While in London we went to evensong at Westminster Abbey. It was still. It was big and safe and quiet. It was so good.

Back to the hat. I had given it up as lost forever, then remembered that it was just left in our hotel room. On the way back from London, earlier today, we had a stop over in Brussels for about an hour. This would barely be enough time to make it to our hotel and back with the hat in hand. I couldn't go on my own. Roommate Tracy, without thinking about it twice, dropped her bags and walked quickly slash ran with me back to the hotel to retrieve my (inexpensive and 'nothing out of the ordinary') hat. The people working at the front desk laughed at us and talked about us in French? Dutch? because it was obvious by our flushed cheeks and hard breathing that we had run and were after something that seemed miniscule. It was a blessing that a friend would take a goal of mine as her own and run, and sweat, and be ridiculed for it without considering it a burden. I am praying for opportunities to be this kind of friend. If it means running to a hotel again, so be it, but in daily challenges and failures and hardships I want to be a person who bears the burdens of other in kindness, who suffers long and is kind. I want to be like someone I know. I want to be like Love.

"Love suffers long and is kind." 1 Corinthians 13:4

Audrey