friends.....

it seems that there is a lot to be sad about lately because there are things that are coming up that are hard for us to face, but the greatest distress that both of us have cried over is .... wait wait wait.... here it comes!!!!


friends....

We are wanting to interact and participate in new ways with new friends but we are really also at the same time mourning the loss of good deep relationships that life has had for us and now seem to be changing in extremely significant ways mainly due to distance... this year has really been something where marriage has has brought the most amazing gifts and one of the greatest has been the best friend that I have found in my wife and she in I... but... yes there is a but... but we still need other friends that we can relate to and live life with.... for us the people that have filled this role in our marriage for this first year have been B and C... but they are, with our blessing and more importantly with God's blessing and guidance, no longer able to fill this role because they are moving away to a foreign country... and while we will still keep in touch and send notes to each other and believe that our friendship is real and vibrant, the experience of having Saturday morning breakfast and sipping OJ, coffee, or some delightful drink while we share our lives together and pray for one another is very soon to become a memory...

SO... "friends"... Amy and I are seeing life change and desiring to know friendship for us that allows a true community and fellowship based on similiar belief systems and years of experience together as we choose to live life together as couples....

WE have sought this out at a new church and even in our community, but there is nothing that is going to be able to replace B and C and the opportunities that we have experienced are something that we can easily be extremely critical about. We pray that God would help us as we face life in the next weeks without them and ask the Lord to help us have a peace about it all.

Life changes in the first year of marriage are hard... one of the hardest is being able to connect and grow with friends, and so we are choosing to pray for it and leave it in the Lords plan. We desire Him to help us to be friendly and desire Him to help us also to be open to being loved by others. We are also praying we would be content and willing to see ourselves in a new light and make good decisions. Our decision making can be faulty if we are vulnerable to making choices that not thought through and something we might just jump at without considering consequences because we are choosing to overlook flags that could be harmful in the long run. We are vulnerable as well to making comparisons to others in this time when we feel like there does not seem to be a good fit for us, but we are asking the Lord to convict us of the attitudes we have and create in us a clean heart that allows us to be true servants to those around us.