I've Still Got Your Back

     My best friend from high school and I have been through quite a lot together. Holly and I met in gym class our sophomore year of high school and have been close friends ever since.
     Over the past fourteen plus years of friendship, we’ve seen each other at our worst and at our best. We’ve spent hours conversing about faith—Roman Catholic versus Jewish— family, relationships, volunteering, health issues, little decisions (such as whether to order a gold or silver class ring), big dreams, long-term goals, great triumphs, and trivial tribulations.
     We’ve gotten lost countless times. One of the things we have in common is being directionally challenged. We have accidentally ended up in random ghettos in the middle of the day and in the middle of the night on two continents and in a number of different cities. As an absolute last resort, we


hitchhiked to the airport when we had no other way of getting Holly there in time to catch her flight from France, where I was studying abroad for my junior year, back to Israel, where she was studying abroad for spring semester of her junior year. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
     We’ve provided encouragement, compassion, and understanding, as well as double doses of laughter to each other during the tough times: injuries, illnesses, car accidents, relationship traumas, family dramas...
     In more recent years, Kevin and I have both been there for and with Holly through rough patches along the road. Recently, having gotten to the bottom of an ongoing health concern of hers, Holly and I got a lot more time together over the past week than we have in the past six months. She was making jokes before and after surgery. Not only that, but she also impressed us with her skills as a registered nurse when she gave Kevin and I a rather in-depth anatomy lesson explaining what went wrong and how it was “repaired.” Gotta love Holly, and we do!
     Lord, thank You for the gift of life-long friends who we love and who love us like family. Help us to nurture and cherish those relationships however we can. Amen.