Sweet Friendship

To be sure, celebrating birthdays--this time, mine-- is a great way to bring friends together for a much needed visit, but this group of ladies is so much more than a birthday club. Over tea and coffee and enJOYing each others company, we added up our combined years in Jordan: 117! Together, we have raised 20 children, many of them born in Jordan. We have supported and prayed for each other through troubled times, including serious illnesses, visa denials, struggling children, and rejoiced with each other over marriages, births of children, then grandchildren, and opportunities for each woman to be used by God to bring life to others.

My anticipation of spending time with these dear women was punctuated by my delight in each one of them, so different from myself, and yet each a soul-mate in her own way, a beautiful snapshot of the body of Christ in my life. How I value and admire the gifts and talents with which God has blessed each one.

"Friendship is one of the sweetest joys of life." C.H. Spurgeon

My "oldest" friend, Julia, actually the youngest of our group but the one I've know the longest, shared this passage with us from C.S. Lewis , "The Problem of Pain." It come from the chapter entitled "Heaven" :

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”  


Perhaps I am not fully understanding Lewis--there is certainly a good chance of that--but I find that as we grow old(er), these things we desired and will still desire on our deathbed, these things we've been looking for even before we knew were were looking for them, things we have seen mere shadows of, are communicable. We are women, after all! What a blessing God has made each of these women in my life, as we journey toward this Promise to be fulfilled, bearing both the uniqueness and the unity which God has given us.