Friend, How You Come & Go

'You put yourself out there, hoping that in being vulnerable you will make a forever friend' I think to myself. I am just that kinda girl. I choose....in wanting a forever friend....yes, I make the moves in my life. Things don't always turn out the way I thought they would.....or even how I wanted them to at times in the realms of friendships. I have gone through the wanting of a true friend and someone who wouldn't bail on me no matter the circumstances it seems all my life. I have only found a rare few. *You all know who you are.* The one friend that has stuck around with me no matter what......the best forever friend ever is who you might ask.......God.

I always wanted to have many friends as a young girl....even as a young teenage woman I also wanted to have a large group of close friends to call my own. I have learned that friends, they come and go. I have had my heart so filled, and yet also so very broken over the years. More broken than not....I don't know why it seems to happen to me over and over. Maybe it was something I did......? Maybe it was God's will to have that certain friend in my life at the time....but then maybe they were not the forever sort....perhaps they were the iron sharpens iron sort....?

I have always been the type of girl who 'chose' her friends carefully, and rather timidly might I add. Sure friends may just have come along...because whether it was God who brought them along my path...or the fact that I just met them in happen-stance.....the rest being history as it were... Each 'friend' in my life has helped me fine tune my character and self as a Christian young woman. I wouldn't be who I am today without all of the heartbreak and joy that was interwoven and wrought within my life. Intertwined together, heartbreak and joy, they can be a wonderful thing. They cause tempering, they cause perseverance, they cause peace and they cause my heart to rely on someone other than just friends and this world. The heartbreak made me cast my glance once again back on God.

I don't know completely why, but the thoughts of old and lost friends have been on my mind so heavily placed recently. At times I feel like I am stuck, with not many friends to call my own. I long to share my life, love and joy with others. I want to bloom where planted. I want friends here. I want to share Christ with as many friends as I can. I want to commune with dear friends here....to grow in Christ together....to spur each other onwards towards living life as if we were already HOME. I so long to grow here...where I have been planted. My heart is so torn at times...it is striving so hard to learn how to be here, but it seems lost at times. My heart is so desperately trying...it is here and there....my old home town, my old church (Manna) and in Charlotte where my guy lives. My heart is stretched thin.....so thin that I fear it could potentially break sometimes.

I want to know where to go, move, stand, find peace, find more forever friends...how am I to find all of this? Do you have any thoughts? Maybe you all have some words of wisdom or courage to impart to me perhaps? I am struggling to live here where I have been placed at times....but the struggle is good I think. I was so burned here last year......I think I am scared to go out in this town and strive to find new friends. I wonder if I will be burned.....and I don't want those kind of thoughts to stop me! I want to conquer this beast of fear and doubt. I need prayer. I need to find a way to begin again here.

I think all this tempering will serve me well...

-Daughter of the King