This last weekend was a high friend count weekend.  I went to visit Paula and Greg on Friday night, after having lunch with Jennifer and Whitney.  On Saturday I spent the day with my girlfriends from high school, and on the way home, picked up another friend at the airport to be dropped off along the way.  Sunday morning I had a date with another couple of friends to go to the Covered Bridge Festival, and along in there somewhere, one of those friends said something about me being busy with my “14 groups of friends.” It was an exaggeration, I think, but then we started counting, and, if you go by the math, I am very rich in friends.

If feels like arrogance or boasting to talk about having a lot of friends, but I am very aware that I am fortunate and blessed to be surrounded by talented, compassionate, varied, and brilliant people.  Those same people are occasionally messy, hurting, frazzled, and insane, just like me.  It’s in those genuine times when the masks are off and you see past the pretty picture that we all try so hard to project, it’s in those times that we truly connect and grow.  Isaiah says, “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another”, and if we don’t live closely with other people, we miss out on those beautiful moments that happen in naked honesty.

To my friends, thank you for letting me into the spaces in your lives that are a wonderful combination of beautiful and messy.  It is a gift from God to know you well and to be known by you, to walk alongside you on this journey we travel together.