When I say "best friend" the description no longer has a single picture attached in my brain.
Jana Wilson, my best friend, knows me in ways few do. We've been friends since the 3rd grade. How do you measure the person who has known you and loved you skinny and fat, clear-skinned and pimply, up and down, through the trials and joys of life? Her heart for Christ, for her family and her friends is a beautiful treasure.
Kathi and Craig Sipes, my best friends in California, whose kids (inexplicably) love me, who have taken us in as part of their family, whose love and friendship is one of the greatest treasures in life, who taught me about life and marriage and fun. How dear to my heart!
Scott Ayler, my best friend living in the Middle East for so many years. Friends since high school, I have always felt honored to have such a fine man for a friend, and have been delighted that our friendship never seems to falter though years come and go between visits. Scott is one I would have trusted to raise my children if something had happened to Steve and me. I am so pleased with the man he has become.
Beth Knight-Pinneo. Best friends in 9th grade, we stayed in touch for a few years after she moved. She was one of only a very few people who questioned (to my face) getting married so young. I have always loved and respected her for that. A few years back we got in touch again. I, having temporarily given up searching after several unsuccessful attempts, was instead contacted by her, to my amazed delight.
She is another whose friendship is a great joy to me. Seeing her again was like stepping into a favorite pair of shoes, uncovered in the back of the closet after having thought them lost for several years. Amazed to find they still fit, in no time at all, the stiffness is gone, and the shoes (friendship, if you are still following my analogy) are placed in a spot of honor, never to be lost again. Though our lives are at very different stages, she has young kids and mine are grown, we see each other at least every couple of months and keep in contact by phone and e-mail.
And new best friends--people who are of great character and great heart--who are sympatico. These are ones who I can foresee a point in the future when they will be as dear to me as those listed above. I have been truly blessed with friends. Best friends. Great friends. Great people. Wonders all.
3 comments:
Thank you - I'm honored!
One of my favorite memories is receiving your "audio letters" on cassette tapes after I returned to Japan and playing them over and over and over. I still have them, and the paper letters too. Somewhere in the subterranean maze of boxes. I remember a friend challenged you to write a song and you wrote one on Butterflies. Do you still remember it? If the cassette tape still works, I have that somewhere too.
As for our current friendship, I love that we can call or not call, and ask things we wouldn't ask other people easily, or say things we wouldn't necessarily say to other people, and we can be together for 3 seconds or 5 hours and it's all fine and great.
Love you!!!!
I do remember the song. I might even be able to play it, given a piano and a little time to work out the rough spots in my memory. Somewhere in the past couple of years my box of cassetes disappeared, along with all the letters. I blame the garage fire. I'll never know everything that was taken and dumped as unsalvageable, but those tapes (and the dozens and dozens of music cassettes, sermons, speeches, etc.) simply vanished. Bummer.
The song went like this:
All my life I remember hearing
Jesus Christ, crucified for me
But just like a butterfly I went floating along, I thought I was free.
Then I was called to an old man's bedside,
He was dying in agony,
And just like a butterfly I could no longer be
I wasn't free.
The rest is slow in returning to my memory.
That's way more than I can remember. That's very good. Well, someday when Mitch & I "dig up" our downstairs! Like an archeological excavation.
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