Friendship

Friendship is such a funny thing, it often dates back to the people we met in childhood, people we still rely on and call our friends not just into, but enduringly in our adulthood. My best friend Natalie was a person I met when I was nine years old, we have been through trials, tribulations and both terrible and wonderful things together. We live on different continents, don't speak that often, but are always there for one another regardless of the divergent paths we have taken, how often we communicate or whether we see each other or not. I always know if I need her she will be there for me and I for her. She is a person I love, and always will, she is a friend, but she is also a chosen family member for me.

Jesus treated his disciples as both friends and as his family. Love transcends all the differences we have, love is the one thing that can bind us. We choose our friends, but we also choose a family for ourselves through the community we are part of. We need to stop looking at ourselves as a divided global separation of nation, but a family of diversity and beauty in that difference, in our global community, our global family, our global friendship base. A family that stands together and is also friends with the members of the family we are part of, that way we are all accountable. If we could see ourselves as all family within the human race, and all friends as part of the global community, we would understand that we will differ, argue at times, disagree, but ultimately be able to love, laugh, share, weep, and understand; transcendent of all our differences and all our disagreements. We need to go back to being the children that God created, created out of love and to love.

"And any town or family that divides itself into groups which fight each other will fall apart." Matthew 12 vs 25

For in viewing our world as a place we should be able to be one, many things must be respected.

"By the Heaven and Him that built it; by the earth and Him that spread it; by the soul and Him that moulded it and inspired it with knowledge of sin and peity; blessed shall be the man who has kept it pure, and ruined he that has corrupted it!"
Translated from the Koran Chapter 91

We spend so much energy on corrupting our lives, our world, our families, our friends ... isn't it time to stop and say, "I don't want to be either corrupting or corrupted".

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace" - Jimi Hendrix.

So in this brief blog I hope that we can think of love as being so important not only in family, but in friendship and see that if we viewed everyone we came into contact with as both friend and family, we can strive to be in a better world, one in which we would be able to be participant in, without self gain or the ambition to crush others to get there. As family and friend, we would have both the ability to disagree, but also the path that holds us united in one relationship.

I just spoke to a friend from Barbados, who I met once before inviting him to stay in my home for a couple of weeks. The beauty of the friendship was that we got to know one another in the time he was here, we learned about one another, disagreed, agreed, laughed, cried and just shared so much. My youngest daughter grew to love him, and he has such a soft spot for her. If we hadn't taken the risk of sharing a living environment in the first place none of us would have gained that wonderful time together. Friends are so special, we need them, we sustain ourselves through friendship. They are there in times of joy and time of need, they create times of joy, they sometimes create times of need ... but they are our chosen family, part of who we define ourselves as. We should seek friendship wherever we are in life, it is so very rewarding and valuable.

Love, peace and solidarity
Tanya