“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
Henri Nouwen

I love the painting below. If I could copy it I would, and hang it in my living room. This was posted by Ravenous Butterflies.

I don’t know. I have friendships sustained for years, some from high school, others from work mates. The problem is that they are not close geographically. I have one friend nearby but she’s in a strangely different place currently, having given up her home to her nephew and moved in with her sister. There it is Invasion of the Body Snatchers as she has ever so slowly—step by step—become like those living there, in her sister’s house. (Forgive the mixed metaphor but it is so necessary.) She has let her hair grow long and longer. Now she can’t wear it down as she used to like it as it is too scraggly. It is always back in a type of French bun. It is now dyed the same color as her sister’s. She was an absolute coffee fiend. Now she drinks a soft drink, a cola, the same as her sister. I could go on. An outward manifestation of an inward surrender of self. I don’t know how she manages but she seems ever so happy these days. That’s what I don’t know, don’t understand. Can we be happy in the surrender of our very self? The philosophers say we cannot. Maybe they’re wrong.