Some may have been the greatest of friendships at the time and then your life would take a turn and those you were so very close to would be gone from your life. It's as if you walked together side by side and then came to a Y in the road and your path went one direction and your friend's path the other. If you look at your life, these Y's in the path happen quite often. Some of our "friends" may now just be a sweet memory of a season in our life and there may be a handful or less that we continue to stay in contact with. Friendship takes work - it takes one or both persons to make an effort to stay in touch, be it by email, phone or in writing. Without one person making the effort, the friendship will slip away into a memory. I guess this is just part of the evolution of our lives while we are here on earth. When I think of the friends I've known and the roles we played in each others lives, I realize how wonderful and necessary those relationships were at the time. We each helped one another in different ways, but for us to become the people we are today, we needed to be in each others lives at that time. Some of my friends taught me life lessons and some I was able to help in one way or another. I think of friends as part of the growing process. There are some I still wish were a part of my life today, but I am no longer the same person, nor are they. We have each grown and followed different paths that were required of us, so the closeness we once felt cannot be duplicated today. Others will come into our lives in the future and play important roles, but we shouldn't try to hold on too tightly, for they also will have to take a different path when we both reach the next Y in the road.
Sometimes our lives tend to get so busy that we put aside our friends and some of these are the people we care the most for in our lives. We think that when we have more spare time, we can get back in touch with them. We are often wrong.
Sometimes we fail to say the thank you's we should - or the "I love you's" or "I care about you's" to the people who mean the most to us. We forge through every day doing what has to be done, saying hello to those we see, but what happens to those we don't see? They don't cease to exist just because we don't see them or talk to them.
Friends, whether family or not, are gifts from God. He brings these people into our lives for a reason. He also chooses the times of our lives when we will need these people the most and He chooses how long the path is that we will walk together.
Through out my life, I have made it a practice to contact friends from my past if for an unknown reason they are on my mind. This has always proved to be just the time when they needed to hear from a friend. A couple of years back, I looked up the phone number for a friend I had not seen or heard from since our paths went in different ways - more than 20 years before. When he answered his phone and I told him who was calling, I thought he was going to crawl through the phone and hug me. He was so very happy to receive my call. We visited for 20-30 minutes and as we were ready to end the call he told me that I could not have timed my call better. He said he really needed to hear from a friend that evening and at that point in time. I don't believe it was a simple matter of timing. I believe that God helped me to think of my friend and to feel the need to make the call when I did. God knew he needed to hear a friendly voice. Today, I called a friend I have not seen for more than 10 years. His job is extremely demanding and I wasn't surprised when I had to leave a message on his phone. When he called me back he sounded so overjoyed to have received a call from me - a friend who almost slipped into a memory.
So, today I urge you to ask yourself, who needs to hear from you today?
And why haven't you touched their heart by contacting them?
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