By Winnie Bolton
Aristotle once said, “If one could have all the good things in life but be without friends, one would choose not to have the good things rather than be friendless.”
Aristotle, a Greek philosopher and scientist who, more than any other thinker, has characterized the orientation and content of all that is termed Western civilization was also the tutor for Alexander the Great, 4th Century B.C.
So my friends, he is worth noting?
Personally I feel friends are not made but discovered. Friendship has a magic quality and a secret destiny. Something that’s startling about one’s friends is that the first meeting was so seemingly accidental, and yet, if you look back now your life would be unimaginable without friends who have helped to shape you and give birth to your soul.
Because there’s something radically creative in the human spirit and mind, and because that creativity is linked to the absence within us, there are places of incompletion, places where we are hungry within ourselves.
Only in the kinship of friendship do we actually become one with ourselves.
A friend is a true mirror in which we begin to get some little glimpse of who we are. Friendship is a shelter that liberates us. Looking into the other is looking into yourself because the other is a mirror of you.
People do move distances away from each other but there is some corner of the heart, if we’ve loved a person, that always remains open and attached to them in some way.
I don’t promise it is just by chance but only by God’s grand design that He has guided our steps to learn from others and opened our paths to them.
I have encountered friendships among the many states I have traveled into, lived in, and moved out of only to find loving hospitable people again waiting to welcome and assist me and my family to feel welcomed.
In today’s worn and tattered world we read, see and hear through TV channels and newsprint too many lurid, morose events about people’s behavior toward one another that could be depressing if we never encountered loving friendships.
Let’s all try in 2012 to simply appreciate our friendships even more than we do, and open our ever-expanding hearts to include some new ones like our loving Lord’s heart consistently displays.
