I ran into a friend I haven’t seen in quite a while today while I was at work. The funny thing is that I remember Haley mostly as the younger sister of my friend Mallory. It’s funny how things change. Well, she’s still Mal’s sister, of course, but I just found out that Haley has been married for nearly a year and has a beautiful baby son, Dewey.
You know, I kind of feel “out of the loop,” I guess, if that loop even exists anymore. When I first became involved in church–and for quite some time after my salvation as well–a whole bunch of us were pretty good friends. Admittedly, I sometimes felt like a straggler–most of them knew each other for their whole lives and I was the “new guy.” Regardless of that, though, they are great people, and I’ve nothing but love for all of them, wherever they may be in their walk of life. Some of them I see, some of them I occasionally hear from, and others have seemingly vanished from the face of this earth. So Stacey, Jennifer, Haley, Mallory, Ashley, Sarah, Jonathan, Rebecca, Jonathan, Jason, Joe, Nikki, Tiffany, and everyone else who was with me through my infant years of faith, I love you all, and I hope that I will never forget you. If by chance any of you read this, drop me a line. I hope God has been good to all of you as He has been to me.
As far as I know, this circle–which for most of them included quite a few other people who I never got to know well, if at all–has pretty much broken up, sadly. We’ve all grown up, some have gotten married, and some have children now. It’s amazing.
But God has said that a friend loves at all times. There is much comfort in that truth.
This post was posted in May of 2007, though it originally appeared on a previous blog. Its time stamp has been set to reflect that of the original posting, in keeping with the temporal nature of the first paragraph.