Friends

     As I write this, I am surrounded by good friends. They are friends I haven't necessarily known for a long time, but they are still friends. One friend I spent several hours with giggling, curling hair, and dousing ourselves with sparkles before donning pretty dresses and heading out to a masquerade. One friend I love with and she fills everyday with silliness and joy. One friend I know tangentially from the second friend and he recognizes the value of many things the rest of the world dismisses. We are all sitting around my living room late at night, two of us puttering around on our computers and two of us crafting spectaularly inventive Christmas decor for our several bland apartment. Michael Buble is playing on Pandora and I have just put away my homemade cinnamon raisin whole wheat bread.

     I have other friends, ones I have known so much longer and with whom I share many sweet and precious memories. But these friends are here now. These friends have seen me at my worst and at my best and understand what my school and the people in it are like. Friends are people who accept you and cherish your oddities and don't mind you sitting in your pj's on the living room floor with the remains of fancy make-up on adding random, semi-helpful comments about the decorations strew about you. I love my friends, but I have never really understood the value of companionship until recently. I have never wanted to need people, seeing this desire or need as a weakness. People will always leave you, so never need them so much that they can hurt you.  Now, I know that God is my constant in my life and the steady stream of people flowing in and out of my life--some drifting away only briefly, ever to return, and others flowing forever away, never to return--is not a weakness but a blessing. God is teaching me to love fully and openly, acknowledging that nothing is permament but all people are eternal and that each soul He chooses to run headlong into our lives (or even just tiptoe around the edges) is precious and oh-so-important. We cannot measure who they are to us or who we are to them. We must just open our arms and our hearts and, smiling our hugest of smile to our Heavenly Father who loves to surprise us with gifts that delight our souls, say "thank you."



                                                              Thank you.