Finders, KEEPERS

…Losers, weepers.

That’s what just happened to me. I wrote an entire piece on the subject of holding on to friendships, and perhaps due to the earliness of the hour, a lack of sleep or too little caffeine, just completely lost it in the process of posting it. I feel like weeping.

Perhaps it was for a purpose, a too powerful example of what happens when we don’t put the effort we should into saving what we’ve worked to develop. If it’s true of what we write, how much more so is it when it comes to people. They can vanish just that easily from our lives if we don’t put some effort into maintaining the relationships.

Meeting new people in the blogging community and developing friendships with the same is one aspect of the Blogging Challenge that I particularly enjoy. But I found the maintaining of those friendships to be the most difficult, the lack of time being an inescapable enemy.

It’s not like I wasn’t warned ahead of time, and so I entered the month of April with my posts for my other blog (A Heart 4 Heaven) already written and just waiting to be published, giving me at least some time to visit other blogs and meet their authors. But at the last minute I threw a kink in the works by adding this additional blog as a writing exercise. Suddenly my writing time doubled and my already short visiting time was cut in half. I’ve been struggling to catch up on the latter ever since.

Friendships need constant input to be maintained, a give and take of thoughts and shared experiences to keep the relationship thriving and growing. And if that is true of our human interactions, how much more so is it true of our relationship with God. Sadly, that is the one friendship that seems to suffer the most when our schedules are long and our time is short. Yet there is no relationship more important nor one that reaps a greater benefit, in this world as well as the next.

Being a “keeper” means more than being the type of person that people want to hold on to. It also means one who works hard to hold relationships dear, pulling tightly on heartstrings that bind us to our loved ones…and the Lover of our souls…despite the busyness of life that tries to cut those cords and let them fly away.

“A man that hath friends must show himself friendly, and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.”
(Proverbs 18:24 KJV)