A Little About Wildflowers, A Lot about Friends

I love wildflowers.  Lupines are probably my very favorite wildflower, although there is a heavy field of competition.  In Northern Minnesota lupines are blooming near the end of June and through the beginning of July.  They are in random roadside places and in meadows, and I wait for them each year.  Most of them are purple, which is my favorite color, of course, and mixed in are some pinks.  They are so beautiful.

This post isn’t really going to be about lupines, though.  Lupines are beautiful, but over these past few weeks, I have really been stunned by the diversity and beauty of this collection of friends that I have.  It’s true that I have friends who are physically beautiful, but even more beautiful to me are their amazing personalities and the uniqueness of each one of them.

Maybe because I have had the opportunity to spend time with so many different friends who live in places far flung these past few weeks, I have really noticed the diversity that I am blessed with in my collection of friends.  I have never been a person to have a mass of friends, instead, and probably because I’m introverted to start with, I tend to have a few friends, but those friendships run deep and are very precious to me.

I have good friends in my neighborhood, in my church, and far flung to places all over the country:  Georgia, Montana, Wisconsin, North Dakota, just to name a few places.  There are more.  Each one of those friends is so very, very different, and each one is constantly blessing me in unique ways.  I have friends who are social maniacs.  I have friends who are introverted like me, only calmer and wiser.  I have friends that bless others all around the world with their ministry.  I have friends that are silly and crazy and full of laughter, and when I spend time with them I am in stitches, yet they are comforting and understand me in unique ways at the same time.  I have friends that pray for me and with me.  I have friends that come over for supper and don’t care that my house is a disaster because their house is too.  I have friends who are in my life multiple days of every week, and amazing, strong and deep friendships with friends that I might only see once or twice a year, but the time we spend together is insightful and refreshing and so very deep that it makes up for all the days we don’t see each other in between.

Over the past few weeks it has been very apparent that each of those friendships is so very valuable, and each one graces me and restores me in a way that no other one of my friends could. Sometimes you choose your friends.  Sometimes your friends choose you.   There is so much to be gained by pursuing friendships.  It’s not always an easy thing to do at this stage of my life, in the middle of motherhood, when it seems that everyone in my family needs me all of the time.  When I have a few spare moments to myself, I often want to steal away and be alone, but those friends, they are so worth it.  So even though these days I’m not always the greatest letter writer or emailer or phone conversationist (OK, let’s be honest, I never have been a good phone conversationalist), I am so grateful for my friends.  I hope there are ways that I can be a blessing to them as much as they are to me.