LOOSING A FRIENDSHIP__DEVOTION #6

You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy,

PSALM 30:11 [NLT]

Throughout my life, I have experienced difficult periods of time regarding my friends. As a teenager, I found keeping a sense of joy in my heart to be quite incapacitating, especially when I believed them to be with me in my life for all times. It would be one thing if they had died; otherwise, it left me pondering what went wrong in our relationship, especially if there had been no closure to what might have happened.

Losing a friend, particularly a good friend, left me rather upset and questioning the Lord as to why she had left being part of my life. Looking back as the 73-year-old faith-driven Christian woman I have become, I now know the Lord could have been trying to shield me from being physically, psychologically, emotionally, or even spiritually harmed in some way.

My young sisters-in-Christ, I want you to realize that it is okay to question and ask the Lord why a certain individual has been taken out of your life so unexpectedly. It will be helpful if you realize that the answer you are seeking might not come at the moment you’re asking this, for the Lord might be waiting for you to feel better about your loss as you move on in your life without that individual being part of it. Patience is a virtue, for the Lord might be providing you with new and better friends. These new friends, from my experience, will leave you ready to start singing and dancing instead of continuing your mourning and weeping about your loss of a former friend. These newly acquired friends will soon fill your life with a natural joy that would be difficult to explain.

This is why I am leaving each of you with this grandmotherly advice, which is that this would be when you realize that this joy could have only come from the Lord himself.

So, being faith-driven, I would suggest that if you should ever have to go through any difficult times with a friend, you offer a prayer like this to the Lord.

“Lord, I ask for your kind assistance in helping me find new and truer friends who could have only been sent by you to become part of the life you desire for me to live. I am thankful that you are filling my life with joy, a joy that is difficult to explain.