Last night I was laying in bed thinking about this and decided if I had time, I would write about it today: FRIENDS. Not the show, but the blessed reality of people we get to walk through this life with. Yesterday, my mom brought over a couple of boxes of my things from the lovely teenager years…collages, journals, keepsakes. There are some things that really stand out to me, looking back at those clothes, books, things I wrote, things written to me.
#1 – I am still learning the same exact lessons from my personal walk with Jesus that I was then. I briefly looked through those journals in amazement. I was really pursuing Him. I don’t know whether to be sad that I haven’t come very far, or just excited that He was so important to me then, too. All grace. ALL grace.
#2 – I wish I hadn’t let boyfriends and the pursuit of that have such a high place in my heart and mind. I didn’t date, so it wasn’t necessarily about my time, but I did form strong bonds with a couple of guys in my school years. I know that’s all a healthy part of life, but still…it should have been lower on my priority list.
#3 – Friends were my life. School was bearable every morning because of friends. A lot of times I went to church because of my awesome youth group. Once we went to college, wow, it was like heaven because it was just constant community. We were together all of the time, and they were not petty friends, they were true, true friends. Many of our parents were friends with each other, and now most of us are parents. We’re spread all over the globe, literally, some of us doing what we always thought we would do, and some of us doing the last thing we expected. I am so thankful for the thousands of conversations and hours and laughs and tears I have shared with these FRIENDS!
I don’t know if it gets better or different or not, but it’s been hard for me to grapple with how friendships change once you get married. For one thing, 90% of my guy friends disappeared, and I had some incredible guy friends so it really was a big loss! When it comes to my girlfriends, I didn’t lose them, but as time went on past college, I found out who was going to make the effort to stay friends and who wasn’t. It had to be a mutual effort or it was not going to happen… But we move, we get jobs, we spend our free time with our spouse, and what a big shock really, we don’t have 12 hours a day to be together anymore! I was not prepared for that! Then, shocker of all shockers, we start having babies and the only way we girls can talk is by risking our children’s lives while we take the phone to the bathroom and close the door. An uninterrupted conversation just might never happen again.
Oh, friends. Sweet friends. God’s love wrapped up in people. In the past five years, I’ve had a really hard time with this sleep disorder and health stuff, and getting together with friends has had to become a low priority. I’ve been living on a necessity-only basis many months out of the year, and that’s been hard. I’m so grateful for the friends I could at least call or write when I was able to resurface. I’ve been feeling better for about a week and that’s exactly what it feels like: resurfacing. I don’t know for how long or even why, but I’m grateful, and my friends are going to know it!
