When my grandmother was dying, I was living three thousand miles away in New Jersey, in my second year of seminary. It was for many reasons, to put it mildly, an awful year.
One day that spring, my friends Nick and Tyler decided to take me to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philly is about an hour or two from Princeton (depending on traffic or train schedules) and is full of some really neat museums and parks and other things to visit. I’m told that the tall steps leading up to the museum feature prominently in Rocky, but weirdly enough, I was much more excited to see Edgar Degas’ “Little Dancer” sculpture.
The three of us spent hours looking at beautiful things and taking pictures and it’s one of my fondest memories from that year. I stopped in the gift shop before we left and bought two mugs: one with a picture of a Monet landscape and one with a picture of van Gogh sunflowers.
If you’ve joined in for any Sunday or Wednesday service that I’ve led since March 18 of last year, you might have noticed that I hung van Gogh’s “Starry Night” on the wall behind where I sit. Back when I was able to use the room for crafting rather than filming and recording, I hoped that a copy of my favorite painting would inspire me to create. I love Vincent van Gogh and the way that he saw the world–full of beauty and mystery and precious things–no matter how deeply and soul-shatteringly lonely and lost he felt in a world that didn’t understand him.
Almost every single day since that day trip with Nick and Tyler, I have used one of those two mugs. They have the added bonus of being about an inch taller than regular mugs, so they fit a bit more tea. (I drink a lot of tea.)
Two weeks ago, when I was washing my sunflower mug, my hand slipped and it broke into pieces in my kitchen sink.
I found the museum’s website and ordered a replacement mug, even though I suspected that a new mug wouldn’t feel the same. Sure enough, in the last seven years, the museum gift shop has changed both the design and the height of their mugs, and the sunflower mug that now sits on my shelf features a different shade of blue and is the same size as the other miscellaneous mugs beside it.
As we look towards the future, sometimes we have to remind ourselves that things won’t always stay the same. Sometimes that reminder can be bittersweet. Still, I will always be grateful for the friends who stuck by my side through an awful year, even if the new mug that still reminds me of them doesn’t hold quite as much tea as the mug that it replaced.