This post is dedicated to the sweet life of love my friends Cheri and Craig share.  They have been on my mind since last weekend when we gathered together to celebrate their silver anniversary.  Cheri and Craig exemplify what marriage can be when there is a mutual dedication to put the other one first, to provide support and encouragement and to make the relationship a priority.

I acknowledge that there are times when a marriage does need to end for one reason or another.   The normalcy of divorce however makes it hard not to contrast that to the blessing of marriages like Cheri and Craig’s and other dear friends in life long marriages.  It causes me to humbly acknowledge that we are set apart.  Our marriages are important enough to each of us to weather the storms that do come, valuable enough to us to make the required sacrifices and filled with the unconditional love that I believe comes from a place deeper than we can create on our own.

I raise my symbolic cup and toast Cheri and Craig, and all my other friends, who like them are fighting the good and noble fight to keep their marriages sanctified and honorable, fun and interesting, kind and forgiving.  I am blessed to walk this journey of long-term marriage with you and thank you for the ways your example and support have helped Chris and me.  May you live long and prosper – in the commodity that matters most: Love!

I consider myself new to the activity of running – I have tried to make myself a “runner” at other times in my life, but those attempts have all ended poorly and so I believed running just wasn’t for me.  In my quest to try to force it to happen I have even gone so far as to complete two marathons and a sprint triathlon and the Muddy Buddy event a couple times.  I ended up walking the marathons, struggling with the run in the triathlon and using the bike segments of the Muddy Buddy to make up for my slow run time.  Given this history, it surprised me recently when I agreed to join a team of women on a journey to prepare for the Space Coast half marathon in December.  I was challenged (in a very positive way) to do this by my friend Robin Adams and then shortly thereafter by my friend Robin Bennett.  The Robins allowed me to take a new look at this activity and embrace it as the missing link in my exercise routine – friends!  I have been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to exercise on my own at home for the past year.  It’s really just not that much fun.  I kept seeing on Facebook so many folks I know completing events around town, running together to prepare and eating together afterwards!  (I really liked that idea!!)

So about a month and a half ago I started running.  I started slow (well, let’s be honest – I’m still slow) and kept my distances rather short, but I have really made progress!  When I went on that first run I couldn’t finish a mile – but yesterday morning I ran 4 without stopping!  Something happened during that four mile run yesterday that was more significant than the mileage or the speed or the fact that I got up at 5:15 a.m. to do it!  I was listening to a Mercy Me Pandora station and using the time on the road as devotional time.  Somewhere around mile 2 this feeling of lightness and joy came over me.  I guess it might be a feeling that some call a runner’s high.  I, however, have no experience with this phenomenon so I interpreted it to be a spiritual moment of clarity wherein God was validating my desire to run.  I felt all of a sudden like there was a bigger purpose to it than just miles on my Nike tracker, more than calories burned and tight buns (although I am still hoping for those).  Running gives me an opportunity to strengthen my body which in turn provides me more stamina to do good for others.  Running helps reduce the stress that keeps us bogged down and focused on ourselves.  Running with others gives me time to talk about my faith and my sweet savior Jesus Christ.  Running alone provides me time with no distractions where I can focus clearly on my prayers.  I want to run with a purpose that is bigger than me.  I pray to keep this as my central focus and not make my added miles or faster times a celebration of what I have done – but of what God has allowed me to do with the body he gave me.

A couple months ago while riding the roller coaster of emotions related to Conner’s graduation from high school I found myself seeking out some words of inspiration.  I wanted to read clever antidotes on change, on growing up, on the importance of spreading one’s wings.  I needed encouragement!  One little google search and I had enough words of encouragement to get me through graduation (and then some).  I found two really wonderful quotes referenced from the same book and they were so beautifully written I decided I wanted to read the entire book.

Letters to A Young Poet is a collection of ten letters written by Rilke from 1903 – 1908 to Franz Xaver Kappus.  Kappus was a young man in military school in Austria who finds himself at the “threshold of a profession which (he) felt to be entirely contrary to (his) inclinations.”  He is a poet stuck in a military world and he seeks written counsel from Rilke after reading his poetry.  After that first letter, where Kappus admits “I found myself writing a covering letter in which I unreservedly laid bare my  heart as never before and never since to any second human being” a written dialogue began that spanned five years.  Kappus published the letters because he believed they were too valuable to keep to himself, their insight and encouragement would reach countless others if he shared them.  He noted that “where a great and unique man speaks, small men should keep silence.”

As I read the letters, I was indeed encouraged, and invited to contemplate life and solitude and the stories of my childhood.  While not a long book in pages, it is a book I recommend reading when you have the time to contemplate its depth.  Rather than attempt to give you my interpretation of each letter I will list some of my favorite passages (including the two I found in my search noted above) and encourage you to read them yourself.  Maybe then one day we could correspond regarding the impact of his words on our lives.

“Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty – describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory.”

“Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away. – And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses.”

“… await with humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life.”

(speaking of sadness) “For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.”

“… as in us blood of ancestors ceaselessly stirs and mingles with our own into that unique, not repeatable being which at every turning of our life we are.”

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.  For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.  With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.  Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another, it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another’s sake… it chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”

And then the two that led me to this book:

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside of you?  Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going?  Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.  If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from that which is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

“Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.  Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame… at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.”

Cute little sayings about friendship are everywhere.  Every time I log into Pinterest or Facebook I see them: “Friendship isn’t a big thing, it’s a million little things.”   “The most memorable people in life will be the friends who loved you even when you weren’t very lovable.”  “Your job won’t take care of you when you’re sick, your friends will.”

But the nuances and subtleties of the true essence of friendship can not be summarized in a cute quote.  I can’t even summarize them adequately in a blog post.  Every sentence I type I feel inclined to re-type because I can’t seem to find the perfect combination of words.  I want to get this right.

Earlier this week I met up with one of my best friends for lunch, we had not talked for a couple months and I wasn’t sure why – but the separation had weighed incredibly hard on my heart.  It was one of those times where all you can do is play back every conversation in your head, rewind all the interactions and search out the moment that things went wrong.  Feelings are so fragile, even well seasoned relationships can take a hit by ill placed words or thoughtless comments.   I learned this lesson the hard way.  I was not as careful with some written words as I needed to be and I hurt someone I love.

Thankfully, things are on the mend now because  she cared enough about our friendship to work through her hurt and present it to me honestly.  This gave me a chance to apologize and try and make it right.  I think that’s all we can really hope and pray for… a few friends who care like that.  Friends who want you in their lives enough to accept the fact we aren’t always going to do things the best way, or the most thoughtful way, or simply put – the way we should.

What is really beautiful to me though is the fact that I now feel more connected to this friend.  I think it is because her hurt showed me how deeply affected she is by my actions and the seperation showed me just how much I want her in my life.  I told her when we were talking that day that getting older does indeed make us wiser.  I was not the girl of my youth who would have been easily offended by the silence, who would have placed the blame elsewhere, who would have talked behind her back.  I believe my faith has also made me wiser – instead of judging, I prayed; instead of feeling sorry for myself, I put myself in her shoes.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed at how blessed I have been to travel the road of life with so many truly remarkable women!!  Each one of these beautiful friendships work together to make me the person I am today.   Not a single one of them is more or less important than the others.  It is like a giant complex puzzle (you know, the kind you get out on vacation when it is raining out).  Some of my friends have been the outside pieces; not too hard to find, fairly easily placed but oh so important because they create the structure and boundary for everything found inside.  Other friends are those inside pieces, they are the ones you search out, you agonize over, you turn and test and focus on until you get it just right.  What a glorious puzzle my friends are helping me create of my life story.  Oh how I pray I am doing the same for them.