Growing up with electric toasters and a short attention span can spoil you to the art of making toast under a grill. I discovered this as a teenager, when a bunch of us from our youth group went on holiday together. It was a week of high jinks and hilarity, but – it turns out – the one memory that has most deeply burned itself into our collective consciousness is our mixed success at making toast.

I was the one who finally finished off our bread supply. I got distracted by a conversation about Dire Straits, turned back to the grill too late, and ended up hurling a bread-shaped slice of smoking charcoal across the room – into the orange nylon curtain where it hung for quite a while – with the plaintive wail: ‘THE LAST OF THE TOAST!’

I had the unspeakable joy recently of meeting up with those friends from 30 years ago. We don’t manage to meet up as often as we should, but as soon as we do, we wonder why we don’t do it more often. All those stories came flooding back until we were in tears of laughter. OK, I’m sure you had to be there to enter into the full hilarity of our tales, but you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You know what good friends add to your life.

Some things are meant to last, and some aren’t. That week in Minehead quickly had to become a memory, and before much longer so did those teenage years. Friendships are different though. If they are not taken from us by some bitter twist of fate, they can last a lifetime. But only so long as we put in what is required – the time, the effort, the forgiveness, the mileage. If we simply lose them, then that’s a shame and maybe we could have done better.

In my usual extraordinarily roundabout way, I’m making a heartfelt plea. Don’t lose Reform. If it brings into your life some of the good conversation, wisdom and inspiration – perhaps even laughter – of a friend, please help to make it last. Getting a magazine out becomes more expensive every year, and so to keep that happening we need more people to buy subscriptions. Do you, for example, know people who lost contact with Reform years ago who could be persuaded to take another look? Or potential new readers? Could you become a Reform distributor in your church? (It’s easy! Visit bit.ly/rfmdguide16 or contact us to find out more.)

It’s lovely that so many copies of the magazine are passed around churches along a string of readers – as you can imagine, we like to be read. But, to make it last, we really need all the readers who can afford to to pay for it. Also, why not add digital Reform to your subscription for just 60p an issue. To do that, contact our subscriptions team.

Thank you for your friendship with Reform. Don’t take it for granted. Please put in what it takes to make it last.

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This article was published in the October 2016 edition of  Reform.

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