Friendships come in many different forms and many different stages of life. You have childhood friends, high school friends, college friends, and lifelong friends.
Childhood friends are the ones you grew up with and played with after school. You may have played little league together, been in the same girl scout or boy scout troop.
High school friends are the ones that were there when you needed them. They were the ones that you had sleepovers with and went to football games with.
College friends were the ones that you partied with on the weekends. You may have been in the same sorority or fraternity, dorm roommates, classmates, etc. These friends have the potential of becoming lifelong friends.
The best kind of friend are the lifelong friends. These are the ones that start out in one stage of your life but continue to impact your life in other stages. Lifelong friends are rare gems. They are there for you when you need them and even when you don’t need them. They just seem to know that there’s something wrong and you need to talk!
My best friend and I became friends in high school. The stage in life where you are trying to validate who you are and where you are going in life. We have had some rough times in our 20 year friendship, but we never let it get us down. We have had more joyful times than rough times in our lives! Those are the times we choose to remember! I know we will have many more to come!
Have you ever felt like someone was put in your life for a reason? That’s what happened when we became friends. We both had some major life events happen and needed that extra boost of confidence. She had just moved to a new town when her father became the new pastor at my church. The day she moved just happened to be the day after Christmas and her 16th birthday! Our youth leader decided that we would throw her a surprise birthday party! Little did she know that a lifelong friendship would start that night in her basement!
My best friend from grade school had just moved away after getting into some trouble. I had been struggling in school during sophomore year. She had ran away from home and everyone was sure that I knew where she was. I didn’t and I was tired of all the questions. She finally came back and her mom decided that it was time she go live with her dad permanently. He could always control her better. So she moved for good the summer between 10th and 11th grade. I started doing better in school and things were looking up for me in life in general.
Then on December 26, 1999 God changed my life for good! That was the day my BFF turned 16 and moved to my small town as her dad became our pastor. We were drawn to each other that night!
I had to tell you all that to actually get to this point! Haha! Don’t you love stories like that?
Anyway, my best friend and I live 963 miles away. That’s a 14 hour 35 minute drive! So, it’s safe to say that we haven’t actually seen each other in person in eleven years!
Over the years, we have learned how to keep our friendship alive. It’s so much easier with social media and texting these days than it was before though. We use Facebook to share things with each other. We text on a somewhat regular basis! Sometimes we can go days or even a couple of weeks without replying to a text thinking we already did but actually didn’t! We went eleven years without talking on the phone! She randomly called me one day in May on her way into work. It was so great to actually talk to her!
We keep our friendship alive in other ways beside social media. We have this small gift exchange called cupcake mail. We send small packages with things that we think the other one will like! We usually do bigger gifts for birthdays and Christmas. Sometimes we lose track of if we have sent something, but that doesn’t mean we have given up! Life just happens to get in the way! Just because we don’t send every month doesn’t mean we are losing touch with each other. It just means that life happened!
Start your own Cupcake Mail:
Find a gift that reminds you of your best friend. Ours usually end up being random stuff that we find at Dollar Tree. Her husband is the manager of their Dollar Tree!
Package gift in a box with a note explaining what’s going on with this random gift! Sometimes I just put in a thinking of you card or at times no card at all!
Enjoy that you made your best friend smile! It doesn’t matter if you forget a month or two! Life tends to get busy and you don’t have time! The only times we make sure to get a package to each other is birthdays and Christmas. Her birthday happens to be the day after Christmas like I mentioned before so I just send her birthday gift with a package of Christmas gifts! Always wrapped in something other than Christmas paper of course!
