MEMORIES

Even though I am mostly content being by myself, there are times when I wish I had a special Christian friend to do life with. Whenever I have had such a friend, they have wound up moving away, or switching churches and getting involved in new groups and activities, or just making new friends whose company they preferred to mine. Sometimes the new friend would be someone I had introduced them to. That really hurt.

There was a time, before COVID, when I used to reach out to new neighbors, welcome them with a card or some home-baked goodies, and invite them over for lunch. There were people at church I tried to befriend as well by inviting them over for a meal. In some cases my hopes were high that we would actually become friends because it seemed that we had a lot in common to base a friendship on, but my efforts were rarely reciprocated, and more often than not, those hopes were dashed when nothing came of them.

What I don't usually stop to consider is that I too have done the same thing to certain people who tried to befriend me, by judging them before I really got to know them,  and discouraging their efforts because of some fault I focused on such as their being too negative or emotionally draining. Maybe the Lord sent them into my life for a purpose, and they might have turned out to be good friends had I ever given them enough of a chance to find out.

As I pondered these things, a haunting memory surfaced from many years ago when I was a young college kid working as a camp counselor at a camp for handicapped children and had befriended a special needs girl who worked in the kitchen. One evening she asked me if I would go fishing with her, and I used curfew as an excuse because I didn't want to go. 

Her response has stayed with me, but only now am I truly able to empathize with the pain behind her words when she said, "Everybody is very nice, but when you need someone to do something with, there's nobody there." Only now am I able to totally relate.

This post seems to be taking a totally different track than what I started out on, so it probably will sound disjointed, but mostly the posts I write on this blog are written for me and not very widely read, so that's okay.

Anyway, what first triggered me to write this post was that I needed to go out, but my car was buried in snow and the neighbor/friend who used to come to my rescue on snow days recently moved. 

I know the Lord is always with me, but I reminded Him that there are times such as this when I wish He would manifest through a real live flesh and blood person, and He reminded me how wrong my thinking is, and how many times He has guided me through the still, small voice within, and how many other time He has sent a live person when I really needed one.

If there was no one to help me clean off my car on this day, it was because He was giving me an opportunity to see that the snow was soft enough that I was able to do it myself, which would then also give my self-esteem a big boost. And so it was.

The truth is that God has always been with me (even back in the day when I had not yet invited Jesus into my life), and He always will be. He knows my needs long before even I am aware of them, and He has all the resources at His disposal to meet them. When I have a need that requires a flesh and blood person, He will send one to do the job. Like, for instance, way back when my husband had gone missing, and ten days after he disappeared the police came to the door of my apartment to tell me he had been found and I needed to go to the mortuary with them to identify him.

The Lord knew I would not be able to handle the sight of my husband's decayed body, and in perfect timing, sent one of his friends to go with me. As the police and I were leaving the apartment, the friend came walking down the hall towards us. He had heard the news from another friend who worked at the precinct assigned to the district where my husband had been found. Forewarned about what to expect, he had come to accompany me to the morgue and do the identifying for me.

That friend met my need, but he was not the source of my need being met. God who sent him to do it had been the source.