Why is it so hard to find friends? Why is it so hard to keep them?

Is it the busyness of our lives that we don't have time?

Is it that we don't care about being friends anymore?

Is it because our society is becoming so fragmented that there are no opportunities to make.............friends.

When I was 5 I had two best friends. They were sisters. Sometimes they came to my house, but mostly I went to theirs. My mom was a little 'high strung' as they called Monkish moms back then. Their mom was definitely more low key.

There were six kids in their family, three boys and three girls. Kids ruled......at least at their house. In the wintertime we played Monopoly, Pacheesi, and School. I was always the teacher. I wouldn't play if I couldn't be the teacher. We made a newspaper. My mother LOVED our newspaper and paid us 5 cents for each edition until she found out we were taking the paper off the shelf of our classroom. Back then public school provided paper and pencils for students free of charge. When she found out we were taking it for our newspaper, she told us we were stealing and we couldn't have our newspaper anymore.

So, we went back to playing school. And Battleship. Besides teaching me to play chess, my father taught me to play Battleship. Milton Bradley did not come out with the nice game in the box with little plastic boats and sound effects until after I was grown up. My Dad taught me to play Battleship with two pieces of paper for each person. You make a grid with 1-10 at the top and A-J on the side of both pieces of paper. One piece is the one with the boats you have. You block in the squares and that is where your boats are. The other piece is for you to use when you guess where the other persons boats are. Funny how nobody knows how to play Battleship anymore unless they have 12.99 and a way to get to Wal-Mart.

We spent alot of time outdoors, riding bikes, building forts, playing kick the can, Mother May I, Dodge Ball and Colors. In order to play the last four you had to have a bunch of kids, not just your two best friends. For that reason, kids who didn't really like other kids, or pay attention to them at any other time, would ask them to play anyway. Just so you had enough people. Everyone understood that you weren't this big, loving family of friends, you were just a group of kids thrown together by geographical location and you wanted to play a game that needed at least ten people to make it work.

Halloween was really fun back then. Not like now. It didn't cost any money and we never dreamed that someone would try to hurt us with candy. We took our fathers old suits and droopy old hats and put charcoal on our face. We called ourselves "hobos". There was this guy up the street. He was a lawyer but he also owned an Ice Cream Shop. Every Halloween he brought the soft ice cream machine to his house and gave out big, drippy ice cream cones. We loved it.

You knew you didn't need all those other people hanging around all the time. Maybe you really didn't even want them around all the time. But you wanted your best friends. They were your buds. Your sure thing. Not that you took them for granted like that, but that is what they were. They were always there. Never mad at you. Never too busy to come out when you rang the doorbell. Never.

Then you go to high school. Well, THAT'S different! All the kids you went to grammer school are there but there are kids from 10 other grammer schools too. And you aren't the oldest in the school anymore. You are the little ones. The REAL little ones. Scary when you go from 60 in your class to 600.

Your two best buds are still your friends. You never really have a fight or anything. They just kinda slip away. They start wearing long skirts, these frilly blouses and funky beads. They begin to smell funny. What IS that smell? It's not the same as the cigarettes that your parents smoke but the smell invades their hair and clothes the same way. They never really tell you.

Well, it doesn't matter because you are making new friends anyway. You get a new best friend, one who doesn't smell funny and she knows these other two girls that are best friends and you become a foursome. But your best friend can never be their best friend. There are bounderies to this thing, ya know?

Mom sends you to Dance Class, pronounce that with a long A. She makes sure you have all the right clothes for all the cotillions. Boys you barely know start calling and you can't figure out what they want. Really. You're thirteen, but thirteen then isn't like thirteen now. You're still reading Archie and Jughead, and riding your bike around the neighborhood. You're swimming on the team and learning how to do synchronized, but you never notice that the few boys who join are only looking around, not learning the routines.

You're flat chested, naive....... no, stupid is a better word. You see yourself as chubby, and ugly, and goofy, but somehow they don't see you like that. You ask them why they are calling, like REALLY, WHY? The persistant ones call again, but then they stop too. They realize you really don't have a clue. They go to that stuck up private school on the other side of town anyway, so who cares, they aren't really in your life.

Back then girls didn't have 'guy friends'. You either dated the guy or you didn't. There really wasn't any in between on that.

You still see your old buds in the hallway. They smile, say hi, pretend like nothing has changed, but it has. There is a void. What happened? How did it happen? When did it happen?

You got your new friends though so it's all good. They like you, they give you 'props' even though back then we didn't know what props were. You got your 'best' friend, you got your sorta friends, you got your lunch table friends, which are farther back on the social scale than sorta friends, and you got your 'say hi in the hallway even though you don't really know them, friends'. You want to make sure you got SOME friends because it's a big school. It's a city school. It's not too bad compared to now, but it was bad compared to then. That's why Mom always made sure, even though you didn't go to private school, that you were meeting new people all the time, especially at the Dance Class with the long A.

You finally grow up a little bit and realize, duuuuh, why the boys from dance class were calling. You still don't feel very pretty but then maybe they aren't that picky. You start to like this one boy at school and he is your friend. Well, at least as much as boys and girls could be friends back then. After school was out for the summer you send him this postcard from camp. He writes back and tells you he's in LOVE with you! Wait, a minute, WHAT? The hormones are flapping around though and suddenly you think, yeah, maybe I LOVE him too! He comes to your house for a party after you get home from camp. You go for a walk and he takes your hand. You choke up right in the middle of a sentence. Being Mr. Suave, like he is, he finishes your sentence for you. He kisses you before he leaves. That's a first! Braces and everything.

He doesn't call. School starts and you see him in the hall. He won't look at you and when he is with his friends you can tell they are talking about you. They are laughing, smirking. They aren't calling you the bad girl. Not like that. He's telling them you are 'slow'. Like, as in, not fast. You write him a note. He doesn't write back. You write him another. Nothing. For three more years of high school you see him, in the hallway, on the swim team, in the cafeteria. Nothing. How did it happen? What made it happen? Why did this happen?

You go to boarding school for a year. That makes it easier, about the guy anyway. Your best friend crosses that boundary and becomes best friends with the other two girls who are best friends. They write but, it tapers off after a while. You can tell they are getting closer, doing all this stuff without you, but you are having fun too. You got new buds at school. Roommates. There are guys too. Not at your school, of course, they ship 'em in from the surrounding preps for dances. There's nobody like the guy that kissed you though. You start liking this one guy at one of the dances but it's only because his name is the same as the guy that kissed you.

Later, when you come home for the summer, you find out you are not going back to boarding school. You are going back to the city high school. You still got your friends but somethings different. They've changed. Or maybe you changed. They tell you they are jealous of your new clothes and your new long hair. They try, they do, but it just doesn't feel the same anymore. How did it happen? When did it happen? Why did it happen?

My thoughts prod me, they keep me awake at night, like last night, they poke me, tell me to crawl away, find a quiet place, away from the maddening crowd, somewhere I can think.

The classic dread I have always had for seeing my thoughts in written form at a later date has left me. I don't even have the time to re-read now. Only time to scribble and scrawl. I don't know what the urgency means and I do not dare to speculate. I just know that I feel it and that is enough.

My thoughts vacillate from last year to many years past. They seem like another lifetime ago. Where did those days go? Those days of feeling so swollen, heavy, hot and achy. Excited and hopeful. Those days when every thought was directed toward the future and none to the past.

All was perfect because it was all new, unsubjected as yet to my failures and insecurities. All was still a dream.....and dreams aren't real. They are what we make them...and want them to be.

Reality comes soon enough to try us, to prick us to the core. But for a time, maybe just a moment in time, reality is kept at bay by the untried dream. The untested, flippant statements that all children who have not had children make,

"I'll NEVER be like MY parents were",

"I'll do it SO much better!",

"I won't make the same mistakes MY parents made",

"I will ALWAYS be there for my children and they will ALWAYS love me because I will love them SO WELL, so perfectly."

Things like this are so easy to say; I said them many times, if only to myself. They are so easy to believe, because of our ignorance. Simply said, it IS ignorance.

How can one who has never known the demands of multiple children waking you up hour after hour in the middle of the night know the weariness that attends the mind morning after morning? How can one without a nine year old know the panic that makes your mouth go dry and your blood run cold when they encounter a flasher driving right through your own "safe" neighborhood? How can one without a child suddenly turned adolescent know the stark raving fear that accompanies the night hours when that one is not home, safe in bed, and you don't know where they are?

Fear will make you do and say things you never said in your dreams. Weariness will cause you to fold in on yourself and wonder if you have lost your mind. Bone weariness, my mother-in-law called it. I have known that.

Some children are relatively easy. If those kind are all you are given, it is easy to pat yourself on the back and inwardly praise yourself for the wonderful job you think you did. Others are not, and patting yourself, even if you could reach way back there, is not what you think you deserve. I have been given all sorts. Just as I ponder the successes of one I am reminded of the unfinished job of another.

My ideals have been shattered many times over. Not my ideals for my children. My ideals for me.

How many times have I heard my mother's voice, or my father's voice, the voices I said I would never emulate, coming from my mouth? How many nights have I berated myself for not living up to my preconceived notions for that day? The standards that no one but me, no one else, not even God, had set for myself.

It was one of those days when I lay myself down to sleep at the end of it and plead, "Redeem the day, Lord! Redeem the day!" It was one of those nights when I confess my need of the Lord's strength to attend me just one more day. Just one more day, Lord, one more day.

"Because He lives, I can face tomorrow,
because He lives, all fear is gone,
because I know Who holds my future,
then I can face the living
just because I know He lives"
Bill and Gloria Gaither

My son, the one with the Theology degree, has gone back to college to get a history/sec.ed.teaching degree. He is going to a SUNY (State University of New York) school 15 minutes from where we live. He is taking an earth science class and had a spiritual revelation that came from something he learned in his studies at this secular university. I would like to share it with you here. I was afraid that I might mess it up so I asked him to print it out for me and let me put it on here in his own words.

Let me first explain for those of you who may not know, that B.C., the letters that have been used for 2000 years to mark time are not used anymore. Not officially anyway. I think I actually heard this somewhere but didn't think too much of it. The new letters are B.C.E. They do not stand for Before Christ as the B.C. did. It stands for Before Common Era. This is just one more attempt by the secular humanists to erase Christ from everything in our lives. Much like the whole Season's Greetings as opposed to Merry Christmas controversy. Kind of like the whole 'we don't mind the tree, but don't set up a manger on public property' thing that has Christians of all denominations up in arms about. This is just one more thing. Here is what he had to say about it:

"Even with the changing of B.C. and A.D. to B.C.E. and C.E., the secularists can't deny the true reference point for all of time, which is Christs birth. Common Era is merely new language for the old reference point.

Why, if evolutionists, have a better date for the origins of humanity, don't they change the whole dating system starting at, say, 1 Y H, Year of Humanity? From the beginning of recorded time? The fact that the dating system Before Common Era, B.C.E., still starts after a large number of recorded years, still starts at Christ's birth, whether they admit it or not, is proof that they still must count from His birth as they have nothing more significant to count from. It's still all about Christ.

Is this because they CANNOT have any other reference point for time, other than Christ's birth, because even though they "believe" we have been here for millions of years, they cannot decide exactly how many years that is? Different schools of scientific thought cannot even agree on how many years the earth has been in existance, let alone come to some a concensus about how long man has inhabited it.

I believe that the reason they cannot have any other reference point for time is because the origin of humanity, not the events, but the timeline, is hidden from man. God has hidden the Garden of Eden from the fallen creation. We forgot, so to speak, our first estate.

I believe God did this because He wanted the focus to be on His Son. Otherwise Father God, the Creator would have been the focus. He wanted to focus to be on the Son, Who came to earth and showed us and taught us how to live and die, with gracefulness. It is the character and salvation of His Son that He wants us to remember, forgetting all else.

Isn't that something, that the Origin of Man is hidden from us, and so is the purpose of the Cross, unless we, by faith, appropriate it?

However, the life of this Man, whom some dispute the existence and the reality of, is still and always has to be the centerpiece of time.

Until the secularists agree on the hidden origins, they wil be forced to recognize Christ in dating systems. I believe that God has purposefully confused the issue of origin for this particular reason."

"The tendency to cruelty should be carefully watched in children, and, if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing other animals will, by degrees, harden their hearts even toward men."
John Locke 1634-1704

It is now common knowledge that children who abuse animals are more likely to abuse humans. It has been found that virtually ALL serial killers started abusing small animals when they were young children.

Not only did Jeffrey Dahmar abuse animals by killing them and cutting them up from a young age, his "Christian" father KNEW he did this and did not stop him saying, "he wants to be a doctor when he grows up and he is just practicing". Yikes.

As a foster parent I have dealt with this very issue. I have come down very harshly on it. Remember this.....a child under the age of 18 cannot be diagnosed with "anti-social personality disorder", even if they have all the traits. They will be diagnosed with a "conduct disorder". That is the precursor to ASPD. If you know a child who does this, please don't look away.

Don't speak to the child personally. It won't do any good. "A scoffer does not love the one who corrects him, nor will he go to the wise." Proverbs 15:10

Talk to the parents, if they are receptive. " Harsh discipline is for him who forsakes the way, and he who hates correction will die" Proverbs 15:12

Talk to your local county Social Services if necessary. This is vital if the parents defend their "little precious" and can't see the light.

"He who sees cruelty and does nothing about it, is himself cruel"
Abraham Lincoln 1804-1865

"I believe that pity is a law, like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness" Victor Hugo 1802-1885

"You never soar so high as when you stoop to help a child or an animal." Jewish proverb

"I've always believed that alot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other."

Ronald Reagan
April 11, 1984