As I was catching up with my long time friend at our annual reunion lunch get-together to celebrate our birthdays that are two weeks to the day apart, sarcastically and yet with truth, the words “my life has been a complete &%$# up” came out of me!  You have to know that even if said jokingly, I am not often blurting out profanity such as this in my day to day conversations. But in that moment with my life long friend with whom I can be all versions of myself with, what I said resulted in a shameless response of no less than a solid minute of uncontrolled belly laughing from both of us. I knew, despite my meant-to-be-funny use of crude profanity, she got why I said what I said, and she could relate.  As we laughed I couldn’t help but think to myself how blessed I was to have a friend like her, who has known me since we were both innocent Jesus loves me kids tied to the hips during our church youth group days.  A friend like her who later would be my college roommate to share secrets and confess “sins” with and talk me into making late night runs to Taco Bell because she was craving the Nachos Bellgrande with extra something that my memory can’t recall.  A friend like her where no matter the years of life that have gone by and the choices and consequences that came with living those years, and no matter the distance between us, she was my friend forever.  And here we both were once again, another year later and celebrating being another year older, enjoying our time together sharing not only laughs and happy memories, but the heartaches we each had endured over the past year as well.  For me it had been a year filled with grief.  Grieving not only the tragic, untimely death of a brother in Christ whom I had spent Sunday mornings with as part of our church worship team worshipping together side by side, but the day to day gut-wrenching pain of grieving the ending of a six year live-together turned marriage with a man in whom I had literally worshipped the ground he walked on only to realize after 16 years together, and years of hoping it would somehow be different one day, I now found myself with no immediate family of my own to share my life with, having come face to face with the reality that all our relationship had mostly been was two very different people managing to get along most of the time while living separate lives under one roof.  For my friend, recalling the past year brought about other things, and though the specifics were different from mine, it was all the same. It was another year of life lived for each of us.  But the power of our friendship that was and has always been is that I felt loved being with my friend, despite all the mistakes I had made in my life and any regrets these decisions had resulted in.  I felt heard and understood with no judgement, only her genuine desire to want the best for me.  As we exchanged our birthday gifts to each other, I opened mine from her first.  It was a tiny gold necklace with Morse code on it that translated into “For I know the plans I have for you, Jeremiah 29:11”.  Receiving that gift with that message was just one more thing to convince me that what I was feeling together with my friend that day was nothing short of the presence of God right there in the middle of our annual birthday celebration.  I knew that the time spent on that cold and windy Saturday afternoon in January had not come by chance. God was yet again, in His way and in His timing, reassuring me through the stead-fast love of a life-long friend, and that no matter how many times I had failed Him in this life, or how much heartache I had endured,  He has never left me and never would. 

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present not the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 8: 38-39