I’ve been thinking a lot about my friends. It’s fun to have someone to have coffee with and visit. But it’s even more important to have people I can be honest with. Friends who know both the good and the ugly aspects of my life and love me through it. Those that can see in me a love of others and someone who can help me set boundaries to maintain my sanity. They keep me going. As the Beatles song says, “I get by with a little help from my friends.”
The Bible is also a source to affirm the importance of friendship. Mark 2:3-5 “Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’” Jesus saw “their” faith. Those friends put the needs of their friend first and got him the help he needed. They dug through a roof in order to get close to Jesus and were rewarded for it by the healing of their friend.
True friends can be hard to find but are well worth the effort. I’ve had good friends over the years but lately I’ve been participating in an “Accountability Group”. There’s a group of six of us who meet after church on Sundays. We’ve been meeting for a few months now and it’s proving to be a balm for my soul. It took some time to find these women. There were several who came in the beginning but drifted away. It can be challenging with kids and jobs and other responsibilities to make the time to meet but now that we have made that commitment, we’re experiencing the blessings as well. We can share on a deeper level now that we know we can trust one another.
If you don’t have friends like this, don’t give up. Acknowledge that it can be hard to find others to share ourselves with that we both want and need. It took years to find these women who are willing to put the time in. It takes time to build trust but it’s so worth it. But the group had to be something that fed our souls not just one more activity to schedule into a packed week. I kept telling them this will be a way to draw closer to God and one another and not just be one more thing they had to do.
I pray you have these types of friends in your life but if not, don’t give up. You are worthy of love, but it can take some time to find those that can cherish you as God does. Keep going. Keep searching. You are worth it.
Photo by Simon Maage on Unsplash
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