29 January 2009

Friendship


You know, I got to thinking tonight about friendship. I went to a young adult group with a couple of my girlfriends and had some REALLY loud but good worship time, and then a really great message on 1 John 2. It was about how we are different in our levels of maturity in our walk with God. How we can be like babies and be learning, or then we can more like a young man and be maturing, or we can finally get to where we are mature and are like adults or grandparents. The guy who gave the message said that we should seek out those "mature" Christians and attach ourselves to them and learn from them. I am going to have to go back and re-read the passage so that it can sink in even more and I can remember it better for the journey ahead. I got to talk to one of my girlfriends for a while afterward and am so thankful to have her as a friend. We haven't gotten to spend as much time together lately, but we talked and asked how we could pray for each other in the things that we are going through. To me, friendship is taken so lightly in our culture. We have 800 bajillion "friends" on Facebook or Myspace, our phones are packed with the numbers of people who we met in class and don't even really care if we see again, and we always tell people that "we should catch up sometime" but never really do. How can we say that these people are even our friends? Do we know them? Do we care? When somebody asks us how we are, don't we always say "I'm good" even if we aren't? I think the whole problem with our society today is that we care less about more people instead of caring more about fewer people. I know that there will always be people who I just 'know' as well as the ones who I get to know and am close to. I hope that whoever I know, however well, will see me as a someone who really cares. Speaking of friends, I think the best gift that I recieved this year for Christmas was a gift from an old childhood friend. He and his brother came to visit for a week and near the end of their trip, a box arrived in the mail. I opened it and found a smaller box wrapped in gift wrap. I tore through that to find a small box with a disclaimer: "THIS IS NOT JEWELRY!". We all had a chuckle as I stood in the kitchen, opening the tiny package. As soon as I saw the little box I had known what was inside. It was an arrowhead that my friend and I had found when all of us were just kids goofing around down near the creek. It was out on the edge of a limestone cliff and we both saw it at the same time. I was so shocked I couldn't say anything, and he was so scared of the edge of the cliff that he couldn't move. So he claimed seeing it first, but I went to retrieve it. To the shock of the siblings with us, we started shouting at each other for whose it really was. Finally, after crying and yelling and having to have our moms muddle through what really happened, they told us what we should do. Share it. The arrowhead would stay at his house for a while, and then it could stay at mine. Well, this had happened probably 10 years ago and the arrowhead that we had warred over had never changed territories. So this Christmas, as I opened the box I realized that this was no ordinary gift. It was wonderful and funny to receive this gift with such a history of friendship behind it, and that it was really meaningful. Just thinking of these things makes me so thankful for the friendships that I have.

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