Last night I was in the middle of typing a completely different post and noticed the little red light on my blackberry blinking rather rapidly.  I instantly took notice to the large amount of MAILER-DEMON emails in my inbox.  Stupid me, opened an email from a friend about 7 hours earlier that hacked into my email.  Ugh.

This particular email I mainly used for receiving my e-bills, placing online orders, etc.  I don’t use it to communicate with people on a regular basis, except for a select few (my mom and some professors that I keep in touch with).  I recently thought about how maybe I should create a more mature email that doesn’t make store cashiers look at me like I have five heads as I spell it out for them.

I started to reflect about the creation of that email address: a childhood short story that I wrote with my friend Bianca.  She started writing the story, shared it with me, and then I added in my ideas for the plot.  The character she created to reflect me was named Phoebe.  Phoebe then became my nickname with Bianca and her [whole] family.  My mom laughed about how seriously we took it: any notes Bianca wrote to me were titled to Phoebe, any card I received, any gift, ANYTHING I was given by her and her family was to Phoebe.

As I reflected about these events I remembered watching a Joyce Meyer program where she had explained that sometimes you only meet someone for a season. You will know this person a time that either you or them needs the other person for whatever reason/season in life. During the time that Bianca and I were friends we had shared several seasons. I had such dysfunction and lack of stability in my life for most of our friendship. She was the one stable person I could always rely on and talk to. She had helped me get through some of the hardest times of my [teenage] life and we shared such awesome moments. When my parents separated I had moved an hour south and we communicated even more: phone calls, letters, cards, little packages… every several days there was something on our doorstep for waiting to be opened. Over time, as we finished high school and started college we were communicating less and less. It happened naturally. We’re now friends on Facebook and share the occasional ‘Hello’ and yearly ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY!’. When I look back on it, I’m glad that we had one another and I had learned (at a young age) that it was possible to have a true and unconditional friend.

As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend. – Proverbs 27:17

Since then, I’ve met such a lovely group of people who I consider my best and closest friends. They’ve sharpened me in so many ways and taught me so many priceless things about life. But I can’t forget the first friendship that sharpened and prepared me for all the other friendships I will have in life.