Okay classmates… I see you! 

Watching this dance video from our 40-year homecoming in the Philippines last week had me laughing, cheering, and crying all at the sane time.

Forty years later and you’re all still bringing the energy — who knew we’d age like this?

I may have missed the party in person but my spirit was right there on that stage.

Since I couldn’t fly home, I’m sending my love the best way I know how — through words in this poem, “Forty Years Home.”

Same batch. Killer dance moves (and hopefully stronger knees). 

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Forty Years Home 

How can it be that the hometown girls we were are still the same sassy ladies—behind these wiser eyes, inside these grateful hearts?

We come back with silver in our hair and stories in our hearts, carrying babies grown, dreams fulfilled and reshaped, crosses we never expected to bear.

And yet when we see one another—really see one another—we are sixteen again, laughing too loud in the hallway, trembling during English class, kneeling shoulder to shoulder in chapel light.

We did not know then how much we would need each other.

Rooted in faith before we even understood how fierce life could be,

we learned the steady rhythm:

Ora et labora.

Pray. Work.

Fall to your knees.

Rise with courage.

Those words became the quiet strength beneath marriages and miscarriages, beneath careers built and rebuilt, beneath hospital vigils and graveside goodbyes, beneath celebrations that made us weep with joy.

We were never simply classmates.

We were being shaped—together. Forged in friendship. Anchored in something eternal.

And somehow, through distance and decades, through different cities and different callings, the thread never broke.

Because sisterhood like this is not made of convenience.

It is made of shared prayers.

Shared becoming.

Shared belonging.

Look at us now—strong, passionate women with hands that have held babies and hearts that have held each other in spirit even when miles stretched wide.

We are divinely connected—not by accident, but by design.

By a God who knew that we would need witnesses to our beginnings so we could remember who we are.

How deeply loved we must be to have walked this life with sisters who remember our first dreams and still believe in the women we became.

Forty years later, we do not return to relive the past.

We return to give thanks for the gift of growing up together, for faith that held, for work that mattered, for laughter that survived, for love that never left.

And as we stand here—older, softer, stronger—we know—this was holy.

Forty years home, countless holy moments.

All of it.