The Love Of A Friend

The greatest love I have found outside of God has been my friendships. I am someone who did not have the best encounters with friendships growing up. I had multiple friendship groups. My trust was broken, and I had friends who gave significantly less to me than I gave to them. Not just physically, I am talking about the things that really mattered: care, consideration, being chosen, and being made to feel special.

The friendships I had growing up always ended poorly, but almost always started off with intense, trance-like beginnings. I always felt like these people and I would just click immediately.

And I loved it. Straight away, adrenaline and head rushes. Sharing secrets and doing favors, laughing uncontrollably, and an instant feeling of “they understand me.” Even though misfortune happened a plethora of times, nothing could prepare me for when they always crashed. Like a jet in the sky with a terrible pilot, my friendships would crash.

How many best friends had I gone through? Maybe three. Not all of them ended because of something damning. Sometimes it was events like me moving away or them moving away. Those ones never really hurt. After the first two stings, it became the norm. But I got older, and my relationships intensified and were supposed to bear milestones. I realized I was stuck in a cycle of high highs and low lows.

For some reason, I always picked the same characters. They loved me deeply at first, but were always willing to show me I could be discarded. They were not considerate toward me. They were not caring, and I could be thrown under the bus at any time. So basically, a façade. Love bombing, then distance calculated from New York to Mars. Mad long.

They might have enjoyed what I had to offer, but not me as a person. Which was okay. Not everyone is genuine. But why did they always seem to want to stay? Like they had to oppress me and pretend to my face at the same time. Nobody was paying them to do this. And if they were, I deserved a cut.

The love always quenched after a while, and I could see it in their actions and in their looks. I was not their person.

Then I thought, okay. I have a few people I considered friends. They were not high highs, but I started appreciating that more. They were stable. Maybe my frontal lobe developed in the area of friendship, wherever that part is located in the brain, but I noticed the people I became friends with on a slow-burning flame lasted longer. They gave deeply to me. They cared more. They went out of their way for me.

It also helped that I identified certain characteristics I was clinging onto from childhood that kept replaying themselves in the archetype of the person I was picking. But I really want to give a shout out to those people who grew to know me and cared for me.

A few months have passed since I have been thinking these thoughts: “Wow, I have really good friends.” “Apart from the love of God, I feel the most loved in my friendships.” That is a very big statement for me to say.

While I was going through my mass exodus of friendships that had to go, I was willing to seclude myself and enjoy my own company. But then, like spring, some flowers did not die but remained, and new ones popped in. I romanticized it. It had been a couple of years since I had had a bad friend. It has been like that for almost four years. What a blessing.

I made room in my life, and they came trooping in like soldiers. The new was not always a new person, but it looked like a friend I had known for a long time and just finally got to know more over time. We did not rush it. We took our time. It looked like someone who was younger than me, who I did not initially perceive as a wise choice for friendship, but he stationed himself in my life whether I wanted it or not. And I came to find out we were more alike than anyone I had met.

It looks like a friend who laughed a lot with me since childhood. We live in different countries now, but every time I reach out or she reaches out, the feeling is the same. It looks like a friend who watched me grow and I watched her grow. We have seen every stage of each other, but it only made us admire each other more. It looks like a friend who lives far away, but our phone calls last up to four hours.

Everyone is extremely caring. How did I get this blessed?

The unimaginable things my personal bunch have done for me are all things I once gave to others without a thought and never received. Financially, emotionally, religiously in faith, I feel like I have been paid back in double.

God hears your heart. He is also our friend. And He places people along our path to be His representation on earth to each one of us. God really brought me godly people. Reliable, trustworthy, and special in every way.

I do not feel an urge to hold onto anybody, nor do I feel an urge to hide myself away from anybody. I will stay aligned, and so will they.

The love of God opens your eyes and heart to receive the right type of love.

Thank God. God bless all my friends.

“A friend loves at all times.”
Proverbs 17:17

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