So Thankful For Friendships! Part 2

   
 I wanted to take a moment and tell you why the song “You’re All I Need” was special to me back then and why it’s a good reminder to me now. 

All you want when you’re a kid is to be accepted by your friends. Well, that desire was also relevant in my life as well. It can be harder for some kids, though, to understand why a kid is handicapped. That’s why, every school year, my mom would explain to my classmates at school why I couldn’t talk. There were some who understood and some who had very interesting questions. 

I had a lot of friends at school but not so many friends at church. There were several boys around my age and a couple of girls. Anyway, it was not as easy to make friends at church as at school. 

So I decided one day to invite my school friends to church. A few of them came and God worked in their hearts and they got saved! I also had many friends who would come to church on the bus. I remember them being very sweet and kind to me. 

As I promoted into the youth group, I noticed things had changed. Teenagers can get embarrassed very easily. I had to learn how to control my laughter and wipe food off my face, so they wouldn’t be embarrassed. I got invited to only a handful of parties and sleepovers. It was very disappointing at other times, when I thought I was a friend of the host but I was not invited to the party. 

There was a point in my life where I realized I was being nice and friendly, asking how my friends are doing, but they wouldn’t ask me how I was doing. That really bugged me. Many times I would come home from church and cry to my mom. I remember typing out on my chat box, “I wish my friends asked me how my day was.” My mom explained to me that it was normal for most people my age not to ask. As girls and women, we are self-centered. We talk about ourselves and sometimes forget to ask about how other people are doing.

I remember my parents quoting Proverbs 18:24 to me many times. It says, A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.
They would say, “if you’re friendly to others, they’ll be friendly to you.”  

If you wanted to be my friend, you had to realize it was going to be different from a normal friendship. You will have to wait for me to type out questions/answers. Some friends had to leave really fast after church, so I didn’t get to talk to them as much. 

During this time of my life, I had to learn that God was my friend. He understood what I was going through. I had to come to the conclusion that God is all I need. Now I kept being friends with others and listening to them, and soon they started asking me questions. 

I have had many good friendships in my life. Some of them have moved on in their lives and I still keep in touch with them. Others have moved here to go to college, and have gotten married. Right now, I have nine friends or so who are single. It’s always a blast when we hang out We can encourage and laugh with each other. 

My sisters, though, will always be my closest friends, whether they’re near or far away. They are very protective of me like I am protective of them. It’s always fun to hang out and to go shopping with them. I also enjoy talking about when we were growing up and how much we would laugh around the supper table. Memories are so fun to talk about. 

I hope you have enjoyed these last two posts. God is so good!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s