Friday Five: Friends

In her debut as Friday Five hostess, Jan says: "Ever since I found out I could be the hostess for the third Friday Five of each month, I have not been able to get the thought of friends out of my mind. Being an only child (all growed up) who moved around a lot in my lifetime, friends have always been very important to me. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: "The way to have a friend is to be a friend."So today let's write about the different kinds of friends we have, like childhood friends, lost friends, tennis friends, work friends, and the list goes on. List 5 different types of friends you have had in your life and what they were/are like.As a bonus, put a link to a new (to you) blogging friend and introduce us!"

• Very Real Though Virtual Friends In May of 2007 I started this blog. To say that it changed my life would not be hyperbole. I began "meeting" people in the RevGals ring, first in this virtual space, then in a memorable meetup with Diane , then with many more wonderful face-to-face meetings at BEs 1.0 and 2.0. and last year at the Festival of Homies. All of these relationships have helped me trust more in the reality of human caring and concern and widened and deepened my world in so many wonderful ways.


• Soul Friends No friend list could be complete without my soul friends. My Soul Sisters of course head the list. We began as Bible Study companions, but have become so much more to each other. We do still study together, but we also learn to paint together, laugh together, take road trips to look for wedding dresses, go geocaching, cry, pray, share the ups and downs and life and are just "there" whenever. Also in this list for me is C. I cannot even begin to imagine where I would be as a priest and as a human without her. Her honesty, humor and wisdom have seen me through these last four or so years of major life change and transition and she keeps hanging in. She is one of those rare friends who really gets me and from whom I can and will "hear" the hard stuff. God has so blessed me with these women.


• Work Friends This is a new one for me. I always sort of (perversely now I think) kind of "prided" myself on saying "Oh I keep my work life separate." Well now I wonder whatever for.....My workmates are a great bunch of folks. They are funny, committed, smart, professional, and um, yeah, interested in a lot of the same things I am. Maybe it's because it's a smaller town, or I have finally stayed put in one place for a longer time...but I'm finding socializing with these folks to be an additional benefit to my job.


• Old Friends Sad to say, I don't have a whole lot of these. For whatever reason, I have not tended to stay in touch with people from college, or even grad school. I did have someone resurface recently on Facebook from my days in the Big City and we have been chatting both on-line and by phone and that has been great as there was a time when we were very close.


• My Best Friend That would be the one I am going to be marrying one year from today. There is no doubt that friendship came first. Both R and I were ever so sure that neither of us ever wanted to be married, or even in a serious relationship when we began dating. I think that was a good thing, it freed us up to just get to know one another, have fun and not think about anything serious or future-oriented. When love sort of crept up on us, it rather surprised us both. We laugh that we kind of backed into the whole idea of marriage, but now that we are here, neither of us can imagine the idea of a future without the other in it. And there is no doubt that we are friends. We can talk about anything and we don't take ourselves too seriously. I told him I think I have laughed more since I met him than I have had in my whole life up to this point. And I know that I feel safer and more loved than I ever have before. I get to marry my best friend. How much better does it get? (Oh, and if you want to see the dress....it's on yesterday's post)

Bonus: Meet Altar Ego whose blog and comments I have recently been enjoying. Her blog title, Reverent Irreverence says it all!