This morning as I was listening to the God Centered Mom podcast I stopped in my tracks when I heard Vickie Kraft say with deep conviction, “Friends are one of God’s greatest blessings.” I immediately went over to my Blessings All Mine journal and wrote it down.
It is the friendships that I have developed here in El Paso that are making this the hardest place to leave.
I have found friends here that I have allowed myself to be “real” with. And I have reaped blessings upon blessings by doing that.
Making friends…real friends…isn’t something that comes easy to me. Friendships take work and commitment. They require honesty and vulnerability.
I haven’t always trusted myself to be vulnerable, nor have I trusted God to take care of me when I do.
But, here, during our time in El Paso, I challenged myself to dare to be seen.
My heart hurts at the thought of leaving behind the friendships that I have formed here. But, as one friend so graciously reminds me time and time again, distance will not harm true friendships. They can continue on despite our physical distance. We have a connection that is much greater than distance.
This is truly one of the hardest parts of being a military spouse for me.
I don’t like saying goodbye to my friends.
I don’t like starting over.
It hurts.
Oh, it would be easy for me to gloss over it all. It would be simple to pretend that this doesn’t hurt. I could just say that I’m going to celebrate what I had and happily move on.
That isn’t real.
Not for me in this moment it isn’t.
In this moment it hurts.
In this moment I am scared.
In this moment I am sad.
In this moment I want to cling to what I have right now.
In this moment I don’t want to start all over…again.
I am learning to be thankful for all things and in all circumstances.
When I wrote that quote that I heard this morning down in my blessings journal, I was being thankful for the friends I have…and I was intentionally being thankful for the hard process of saying goodbye to them.
My friend’s husband helped me to realize that it’s good that it hurts.
The hurt of saying goodbye to my friends means that they are my friends…my true friends.
The hurt of saying goodbye means that I gave of myself.
The hurt of saying goodbye means that I received much from them.
The hurt of saying goodbye to my friends is being counted as a blessing and not a curse.
Yes, friends are one of God’s greatest blessings. I couldn’t agree with this statement more as I am preparing to say goodbye as I move away from some of the greatest blessings God has given to me.
This afternoon my daughter took some time to make goodbye cards for some of her friends. As I was spending some time with her before bed I told her how proud I was of her for doing that. I asked her if she was going to miss her friends and she replied yes. Then I told her that Mommy was going to miss her friends, too. Then she looked up at me and said, “But we’ll make new friends, Mommy.”
Yes, we will.
And I look forward to that.
I look forward to continuing to open my heart to the women God brings into my life with honesty and vulnerability even though it may cause my heart to experience hurt.
I look forward to it because friends are one of God’s greatest blessings.