Old Gold, Gold and Silver

    A few years ago,  my daughter and I had a heart-to-heart conversation.  She’s the practical one,  I’m the emotional one.  We were discussing my move from my childhood/adult/entire life home.  She wanted me to move closer to her.  I’m still not sure why she thought this was a convincing argument.  ” You need to move out here now while you can still make friends.  When we have to move you out here and put you in a home,  you won’t have friends and it will be too late to make them then.”  I’m even less sure why I bought that argument.  But, I moved out here.  

   I joined a group of women at a local church about four months after the move.  Over the past three years, they have become my tribe. Yesterday this circle of friends assured me that they would visit me in the “home”.  One even offered to move into the “home” with me.  I’m reminded of a Girl Scout chorus,  “Make new friends, but keep the old.  One is silver and the other gold.”   My move afforded me some silver friends.   

   Through my lifetime, there have been women who saw something in me I could not see in myself.   Rosie Yandell,  Estee Eubanks,  Debbie Sprouse.  Here in Colorado,  a woman who asked me to be her “assistant”  and join her in planning and executing service projects for our women’s group.   We planned together,  laughed together,  ate a lot of lunches,  and attempted shopping together.  She hates shopping so I ended up doing that while she stayed home and directed me by phone!   She was a model for a woman who was living until she died.  I knew her for months before I knew her body was ravaged with cancer.    Three weeks ago she text me from her hospital bed  with directions for an upcoming project we were working on.  Five days later,  she went home to Heaven.  

   I was blessed to spend 30 years ministering to girls and young women in Oklahoma.  My bouts with homesickness are directly related to these women and the events they post on Facebook.   Last weekend three of them spent the weekend with me in my ‘new’ home.   One was a product of that ministry, the other two co-laborers in the ministry.  They are part of my “golden friends”.

  Six years ago, God miraculously reunited me with the women of Evangel University from the 1970’s.  The girls I lived with for four life-changing years in college.  We hold an annual reunion now but the real benefit is calls, cards, emails and fb posts that hold us together all year long.  I guess they are “Old Golden friends”.  

    Our world is so full of ‘woman power’.  There are volumes of books about lifting women up.  It’s not a bad sentiment,  it needs balance.  More importantly it needs to be bathed in scripture and prayer.   Women of God should indeed lift each other,  not with the words of the world but the Word of God.   I am ‘not enough’,  not by myself.  I need other women to come alongside me.  I need to hear the truth even if it hurts.  I need to celebrate good news with someone.  I need to join other women and cry out to God for our needs and the needs of our mutual sisters.  We need each other.  Together we need the Holy Spirit to bind us together “with cords that cannot be broken”  by the lies of the world.