Friendship

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one."
-C.S. Lewis

A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is my beloved and this is my friend.
-Song of Solomon

I spent the day on the beach with my best friend, Anita, recently. We met her family in Portland (where they were staying while attending the wedding of Nita's cousin) and drove to Seaside, Oregon to celebrate her son Jonathan's 1st birthday and to spend the day together. It was a wonderful day with great weather, warm sand and lots of catching up as she lives in Utah and I am here. Thinking about that day caused me to reflect on our many years of friendship.

Anita and I met in the 6th grade. I was the new girl in school fresh from the big city. We had just moved to Whitefish, Montana that summer from the Portland, Oregon area and I only knew 1 other kid my age when school started........and that was only because his parents and mine were friends.

I was seated by her and we fell into an easy friendship. We would spend our recesses together and soon we were having overnighters and dinners together. What began as simple friendship blossomed into a very close bond. Even when her parents moved her to Kansas City so her father could work on his degree in music in our 8th grade year, we wrote faithfully back and forth and told each other all the details of our everyday lives and shared who we were madly in love with at the time. When she returned, we simply picked up right where we had left off in our letters to each other as if there had never been any distance.

Through high school, we were inseparable. I probably spent at least as much time at her house as my own and sometimes more. Her parents became my second parents. I called them Mom2 and Papa C. and they adopted me as their "other kid". We went fishing with Papa C together and I even visited her in Calgary, Canada when she was a nanny for a really neat family. We did everything together we possibly could. I knew her husband as a friend before they began courtship and college.

Now, we watch each other's children grow up while exchanging pictures, parenting tips and sharing new milestones. Our kids play together and we consider each other family. It won't be long until we are consoling each other in our empty-nestedness it seems, though it is still a long way off. We have already shared the grief of losing a parent when my mother passed away in January. Soon it will be high school graduations we will attend and how long until we get to share a wedding? Amazing. Time passes like a river flowing by. You listen and admire the gentle babbling or you endure the rough tumbling a while lost in the wonder of it all and soon you find yourself asking, "how long have I been here?"

We have been friends for 25 years now. Wow, that's a lot of time. We've known each other for much longer than we haven't. I can't imagine my life without her. God knew we needed each other and it is largely because of my friendship with her that I now enjoy a relationship with Him. He is amazing in all of His orchestration of the seemingly insignificant details of human lives. Everything has a distinct purpose in His master plan. I am so grateful for all of the friends He's placed in my life, but this one friendship is a shining diamond to me. I would not be whole without her. She knows me better than anyone else and for that I am humbly blessed.