I’m amazed by and somewhat envious of people who have “lifelong friends”. Seriously, how do you do that?
I realize I am opening myself up to being told this is a “you problem,” but my experience with friendships is that there always seems to be a time limit.
I’m sure I cannot be the only person who has gone through this.
After an amount of time, your friendships aren’t as strong as they once were.
Maybe your friend moved away. Maybe said friend got a new job and lives on different hours. Maybe the friend found new interests (or other friends). Maybe your friend met someone and had a family. Maybe your friend just moved on. Time does that.
For those of you who have had a friend for 30, 40, 50, and so on years, congratulations. Your bond is something to be celebrated.
For those of us whose friendships tend to go in different directions after a certain amount of time, trust me, it’s not a bad thing and it’s not your fault.
Maybe tomorrow
It’s not fair to judge things based on today when the next day hasn’t shown itself yet.
If there is a friend who you haven’t seen in a while, you know deep down if you run into them out and about, or you connect again via some online manner, it will feel like you just saw each other yesterday.
True friendship has a way of existing beyond time, not as divinely as our Heavenly Father is “outside of time,” but if you and your friend can let life come between you for an amount of time and still pick up where you left off when the time is right, that’s a blessing.
Once you have a moment to reflect on life, during a break in the busyness, you may miss some of your old connections, but take heart in the fact that most of them aren’t truly gone, they are just on pause for the moment.
It’s OK for life to get in the way.
You’re not a bad friend if that happens.
You do have some control over the situation also. Send that text or message. It’s easier now than ever before to send a message to be read later that says, “Hey. How’ve you been?”
Maybe never
There are some people in your life that you’ve had your last contact with and you didn’t know it at the time.
That’s life. It’s OK.
There are some people in our lives who were only meant to be with us for a certain amount of time.
The Bible has many instances of people going their separate ways — Paul and Barnabas, Abraham and Lot (I know they were family members). It happens.
That doesn’t cancel out or disqualify their prior bond. It was just time to move on.
It can be sad sometimes. You’ll miss that person, you’ll miss the times you had with them, and you’ll miss the moments you could have had with them in the future.
Oh, is that what this is about?
Few things can take our memories away — those were great — but we want more more more. That’s a humility exercise for us all.
Do we miss people in our lives because of the past, present, or future? Do we have a right to always have someone in our lives?
The importance of community
We are a communal Church. We don’t do any of this alone.
Some of our “Church friends” don’t stick around forever either. They move, we move — and not just location-wise.
Every time we walk into a church for Mass or otherwise, we see that we are part of a Heavenly “friend group”.
Does this mean you’re going to go out for coffee and donuts with each and every one of them? Goodness, I hope not.
It does mean that God has certain people He wants to put in our lives at certain times and this will always be the case.
Sometimes God may ask us to scale back a little bit and fix and reflect on ourselves, but we are never going to be truly alone.
Alone and lonely are two different things. Lonely hurts. Many feel that way a lot, but we are never truly alone.
If you’ve been attending Mass at the same church for at least a decade, there is probably someone else there who has been through a lot of the same parish experiences that you have.
Whether you both know it or not, you are friends in the eyes of God.
If you’re too shy to ever talk to that person, that’s OK. Pray for them all the same.
Be grateful for all of the friendships you had, have, and will have. Hopefully, you’re better because of them, and double hopefully, those people are better because of you.
Oh, and full disclosure. What I have just written is not directed at anyone I know specifically nor is it based on any current event in my life. It merely is just something I’ve been thinking about lately.
Thank you for reading.
I’m praying for you.