Why hadn’t I seen that the price of being safe — is the cost of being solitary? Why hadn’t I seen that distrust can destroy a life? ~ Ann VoskampFriendship is a laying bare open kind of thing unless you of course are like most of us women out here who hold the everyday kind of friend at arms length. Fears, mistrust, old thinking messages from days long gone still play, and sourness is sunk in deep.
I have wondered for many years why I liked to be so solitary within my own spirit and soul. I often thought of myself as a person who was open and willing to be vulnerable. I was a bit blind because I found out that while I may have spoke the truth of what I felt or knew within, I held my arms in a great stretch between me and another.
I was in a protective mode. Childhood and teenage dagger wounds in my heart where to fresh for me to move on. I wasn’t willing to be hurt….even though I was as touchy as porcupine. Hurting me was as easy as a heart beating. It just happened. I was a long been wounded soul looking for love with spikes on.
But being alone and being unknown was too much for me and I would guess it is also to much for you. So what do you do? YOU REACH OUT. Not to many and any but to one in particular. One you have a draw to. One God given friend. That is what happened to me. It is through this friendship that I have learned much about myself and her. It has been a friendship of depth. A friendship of asking what, when, where, and why --the hard questions. Lots of people don’t like this kind of heart digging…and I didn’t until I started to feel the pleasure of realness. The shiny polish of shallow acquaintance - arms length friendship - wore off and I yearned for deep fellowship.
Its not easy ….it requires a love of the truth and grace for another and yourself. We are a people of hiding. Like Adam and Eve in the garden with the fig leaves. We do the same thing. We hide and dodge throw up our defenses, blaming, and accusations. All of which I did and still do as I am working through the layers of my inner mind and heart.
None of this is even possible without Christ and the Holy Spirit’s guidance. His sacrifice has secured us the position and standing of righteous. So through that we can walk this truthful, real and open relationship out. The Holy Spirit brings the understand through revelation, and for us these revelations have often come as we bare our scars and reveal our shadowy sides to each other.
Who can bear living the whole of their lives and never learn what it means to really be a friend?Jesus calls us HIS FRIENDS. With Jesus I can tell Him anything and He loves me still. He knows my darkness, hurts, fears and dreams. He doesn’t use them against me, he uses them to heal me. He encourages me as I am in His presence. He counsels me in His ways. He teaches me about myself and more importantly about how to be more like Him, and I believe that the more we are like Jesus the more we will be this kind of Friend.
~Ann Voskamp
STARLA
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