Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Friends, no not the show, well sort of, maybe?

Many of us wasted many moments of our lives watching the TV show Friends.  The premise of the show was the day to day lives of a group of friends.  There wasn't much plot other than that it seemed.  Somehow, this became compelling TV for many years.

What was so compelling about this show? Superb acting? Really! Great plot lines?  They really were quite predictable were they not? The sexual tension between the friends acted out in a confusing circular process? Somebody among the writing crew was committed to pushing some perceived social envelope if you ask me.

I think the ingredient that kept us all tuning in each week was the dynamic of friendship.  Friendship is often a missing ingredient in our lives. Some of us have had just enough friendship to make is yearn for more.  Others, feel like they've been on the outside of the friendship store looking in their whole lives. If you've been blessed with real friendships no one has to tell you how blessed you genuinely are.

Last week during a trip to OK to visit family, Pam and I had the opportunity to reconnect with some of the friends of my youth.  I had not seen some of these friends since our wedding in 1982.  One of these friends played host to the gathering. The one thing I noticed when we arrived was that everyone had gotten old!  How did that happen?  Of course there was that one friend who still had all of his hair and it was still the color it was in High School and he still wreaked of Polo Cologne.

We shared a meal, talked laughed, cried a little, played amateur philosopher, but mostly we just soaked up each others presence.  These were the friends of my youth - the people who were there to watch all the awkward junk as one goes through puberty, that first girlfriend, the first really stupid choice in a line of not so bright choices. Through it all they were and are friends, while they may have brought a word of correction punctuated with the occasional, "Ronnie, what have you done now!", they were never judgmental and often risked their own reputations and security to be there for me.

 I am blessed and thankful for the friends of my youth for they taught me the value of friendship, how to be a friend and the importance of developing friends throughout my life.  Jonathon said of David, "There is a friendship that is closer than a brother."  To that I can only say, Ditto!

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