The Blessing Of Friendship

I have so many wonderful friends... God has blessed my life richly.

I have one particular friend who is rather more like a sister to me. Her name is Ronni (Riri, Ron, Ronaldo, or *gasp* her actual name: Rianna).

Ronni calls me periodically and I never answer my phone. So then she leaves a wonderfully enchanting, rambling and sometimes fairly garbled, but always very long, message on my voicemail. Then I'll call her back or sometimes she calls me several more times and anyway, eventually either I call and she answers or she'll call me for like the third time and I'll answer.

We talk. We talk for hours and hours and hours, unless she's on a fifteen-minute break or driving to a class. She tells me all the funny sories she's saved up for the past month or so (I never have any funny stories for her) and then we talk about our lives and what God's doing, or our frustrations.

I always try to fix all her problems, because that's what big sisters DO, right?? And I always come away feeling blessed by our discussion. We never small talk. She's too busy, for one thing, and we have way too much real stuff to talk about. She thinks about everything a LOT and I think about everything quite a bit, so we always have a lot of philosophizing to do with each other.

We always ask each other questions. Questions for the other person and questions we're struggling with ourselves. She is not at all afraid of REALLY HARD, SCARY, and sometimes yucky questions that nobody likes to deal with. I'm usually game for them, too, even if I don't always go searching them out and so we ask each other all these questions.

It's really hard to ask yourself hard questions without doing a lot of thinking about them and soul-searching and I find that having a discussion with Ronni helps clear out some of the cob-webs and a lot of the time it helps get me back on track or at least motivated to move in my walk with God.

Anyway, so that's Ronni.

Then there is the Mazur family. They are amazing. They have been friends with my family since I was like 8 or 9; we did homeschool together and piano lessons and AWANAs for like two minutes... anyway. This summer they invited me to come live with them.

So now I live in Redmond with the Mazurs. They have a dairy goat farm and Erin has Angora goats. I help milk two goats every morning and every evening and today I helped Mrs. Mazur clean out a stall in their barn and level it with dirt. Last month they put a lawn in in their back yard and we worked on it together for weeks getting it level, raking dirt, leveling some more, raking more dirt... yeah. It's been fun!

I had been living at home with my parents in the the middle of town in Cottage Grove; we had just moved the year before from Elkton where our church family was so we weren't going to a church. I kept the house clean and fixed dinner and did laundry and that was pretty much it. I stayed home while Mom went to work all day and Dad stayed in his office because that's what Daddy does.

Now I live with a family that is pretty much always around me; I attend their fellowship every Sunday (when we're home); there's always so much to do around the house and farm so I'm always busy/occupied with something. There's pretty much always someon to talk to so I'm not left to think to myself all day long.

I can't believe how much the Lord has blessed me with good friends.

I do get homesick, but that's nice in a way. It just means that I have a good life here and I have a family somewhere besides here that loves me a lot and whom I love, too.