A friend in need…

Finish this sentence: “My closest friend is…”

My head starts to cycle when I see this prompt.  Best friend (I know it says closest) is a term that drives me back to seventh grade social wars.  Why must an individual create a friend hierarchy?  But then you get older and friends fall away, and you start to realize that yes, there is a friend hierarchy.  Then, comes the interesting part of this prompt.  What if someone is your best friend, but you don’t feel close to them at that particular juncture?  Do they lose their position and are allowed to reapply in 30 days?  So, my best friend human friend is my wife.  My best, non-wife, human friend is also named Dan, for real.  My closest friend is God.  I mean His spirit inhabits my body, he’s telepathic and omnipresent, and He chose to be with me before the beginning of the world.  Kind of hard to get closer than that.

My wife is with me everyday.  She sees me in every state (but mostly in Florida).  We raise a child together, run a home together, pay our bills together.  We live life together.  She chooses to be a part of my life and to share my joy and my pain.  Why?  I guess that’s what they call love.

Dan and I go back more than a decade.  We met at probably our respective lowest points.  Put together by circumstances, we became friends when only civility was required.  Uncanny similarities exist and support our friendship.  Time has seen us progress from the bottom to bigger lives.  When we get going, its like a fire starting to crackle.  But many times circumstances that attest to the strength our friendship pull us part, also.  I hope there is unity in the future.

God is God.  He is Creator, Savior, Lord and friend.  He is real, not a societal construct that populates a tolerable religion accepted by 70% of the population.  He is love.  I know he loves me.  He knows that humans aren’t always the best at remembering and focusing, so he makes it real simple, not easy, simple.

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’^c 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^d 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

I mean as long as we are doing stuff, that seems like some pretty cool stuff to do.  Right?