Relationships are all about knowing someone’s on your side. Someone’s fighting your corner even if sometimes it mean they tell you some harsh truths. But they’re just waiting to celebrate your successes, or commiserate your failures.
It’s knowing that someone is there for you through the good the bad, and the ugly. Trusting that when the percentages of those get a bit off kilter, and life seems to just get about 90% ugly, that they will stick around.
Its having someone to run to, to jump around with and grin at when you have good news. It’s the friend you dance around the kitchen with on a good day and cry on the sofa with on a bad one. Its having that person to text halfway through the day to let them know you just aced a test, or got the job.
I think we can get mixed up, that a lot of times people think this can only be one persona. I think this can be lots of friends to lots of people.
This year one of my resolutions was to be a better friend. I fast realized this was impossible….not only was it improbable that I could ever be a brilliant friend to everyone in my life but actually the definitions of being that person to each and everyone of my friends is different and individual to each friend. There is not standardized approach, no formula to crack to become this ideal good friend that I aspired to be.
So what was a good friend? It’s being there. Above all it’s making a conscious effort to place yourself in your friends life. To not be passive or an observer of their life, to be fully involved in those triumphs or sorrows and certainly not to only partake in one of those things. Our team of four has been an example of that this year, and one I will always be gratefully for. Through saying goodbye to Andy, and being there for our friend, or being there fore me when I didn’t get the exam results I wanted in the summer, or in supporting Hannah in her amazing commitment to volunteer abroad for 3 months next year.
Along this journey that we’re on we’re realizing the importance of these relationships. Knowing that with all we have going on as we try and reach out to children across the globe that sometimes, on some day if we stumble and fall the others are right behind us, ready to catch us
.
Yesterday I talked about gratitude…. and today I am grateful for the friends I have like these in my life you know you are and you know I’m more grateful than words can say.
And as for me I still resolve to be a better friend, and I don’t think I will ever achieve what I want, but this is one area where constantly striving to be better isn’t necessarily a bad thing. So today I am not only grateful but resolved, to be the friend I’ve described to those in my life.
As I said the other day……I want to be the kind of friend I would like to meet!
ANDYS BEAT! 