Thank you for being a friend

Today I'm so grateful for my friends. I think perhaps that most people are not as lucky as I am, to be blessed with such great friends. I don't know how most people make it through the hard times. But I have great *great* friends. And I keep adding more to the mix. Friends who will call me up when there is a party and I'm not there. Friends who just like to hang out with me and will help me get out of the house when I say I can't be there- even when they don't know why. Friends who will be bossy because I don't like to make decisions, friends who make me laugh, friends who play games with me, friends who offer hugs cause they know I won't ask, friends who randomly give me Starbucks cards, friends who will move my car for me when someone else parked so close that I can't get into the driver side door and they have to crawl over the console. Friends who will tease me and embarrass me so that the whole room is busting up and I'm turning bright red, but also feeling like I'm normal. I'm just Renée, not the friend who is a widow or the tragic girl, but I'm just me, and just as easy to tease as any other girl.


I'm so insanely grateful for the ability that I picked up somewhere along the way to live in the moment.
It's been a really long time since I've felt normal... and I did tonight... and I'm still drinking it up... I think this is the feeling that the idea of bubble baths with candles gives you... I don't think I'd really like a candlelit bubble bath... I think I'd be bored. But I like the idea of it... soothing and relaxing and peaceful... and as strange as it feels that's the feeling I got tonight when I was being teased.

No one was afraid of me, no one was even aware of me being other than one of their friends... and that breath of normalcy felt so good at a time when I'm so very aware of my lack of normalcy.

I don't even know how it's possible to be blessed as richly in friends as I have been, and yet I keep finding more.

I just keep coming back to Deuteronomy 31:  6-8 (It's quoted in Hebrews as well) Moses is speaking to Israel and passing the torch to Joshua who will lead Israel, now... and he says:

"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Then Moses summoned Joshua and said to him in the presence of all Israel, “Be strong and courageous, for you must go with this people into the land that the Lord swore to their ancestors to give them, and you must divide it among them as their inheritance.  The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”

God is with me in this land of widowhood. And the friends he's given me- they have been by my side and they continue to be.

I have not been left. I have not been forsaken, therefore I should be strong and courageous. I should not be afraid, I should not be discouraged.