The Mothership

Friends are so important to me.  They provide me with the ability to see things clearly.  They love and support me, yada, yada, yada.  I could continue but I think everyone, in a different season of their life, has different aspects that are important to them in a friendship. I know the characteristics I valued as a teenager are most definitely NOT the same as they are now.  I have learned through a lot of friendships, or what I thought were friendships, hard truths of what I value in a friend.  But isn't that one of the points of high school...learning who you are and what you value?  I feel like I've only REALLY been able to reflect on this recently.  I wish I could go back in time and save myself a lot of emotional torment and grief.  However, I think all the emotional hurt was vital to my growth and understanding what I wanted in a friend. In this season of my life, I just don't have a lot of time.  My time is separated and doled out to a variety of people. 

I still have a lot to learn about love.  I've put in a lot of years with the same man - 19 to be exact - and yet, we still learn new things everyday.  We are not the same couple from high school ( definitely not in appearance ) nor the same from the first year of our marriage.  Some things haven't changed: we still have loads of fun, we still bicker, we are still each others best friends, we are both pursuing the Lord, he is still faster than me ( some things you just learn to embrace ).  But other things are different: we communicate better, we build each other up, we drop the small things, we prioritize for each other, we are better lovers, we have better boundaries to keep our relationship a top priority, we are teammates, and the BEST one is we are better at respecting each other.  Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of times we have thrown each other under the bus.  There are times when we are arguing in front of others and neither one of us is being respectful of