Thank goodness it’s Monday. The weekend was… long.
We had company over all weekend (so I didn’t have a chance to blog). A friend is going through a very very hard time… that’s literally an understatement. And I have no idea how to help her. I have prayed and prayed and prayed some more. I don’t know what else to do, and I am so worried what she will do. I’ve found a place to take her so she can get help, but getting her away from her husband is proving to be impossible. He isn’t being supportive or helpful at all. In fact, when she told him what she’s going through (flashbacks, memories from childhood rape and molestation) he told her it’s her past, her problem, deal with it herself. And he told her that she doesn’t need to be talking to anybody about it. I can’t, for the life of me, understand how any man could possibly be so incredibly insensitive. Last night he got angry because at the end of church service, she went to the alter to pray. I don’t understand that, at all. And when she asks me what to do, I don’t know what to tell her. I’ve told her to pray, to give it all to God, to ask Him to give her strength, and now I’ve told her to pray for her husband also. But what do you do when your own spouse is trying to interfere with- trying to hinder- your relationship with God? I’m at a loss.
And with everything else going on, I feel lousy even complaining about not being able to help her. There are people going through such tragic events right now that all this seems trivial. I know it’s not, but it just doesn’t seem right to complain about my inability to help a friend when there are three amazing women grieving their sweet babies.
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I received an email from a friend that gave me a much needed chuckle and I want to share that with you. Maybe you, too, need a good chuckle on this Monday morning.
Letters to Dear Abby
Dear Abby admitted she was at a loss to answer the following:
Dear Abby,
What can I do about all the Sex, Nudity, Fowl Language and Violence on my VCR?Dear Abby,
I have a man I can’t trust. He cheats so much, I’m not even sure the baby I’m carrying is his.Dear Abby,
I am a twenty-three year old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It’s getting expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don’t know him well enough to discuss money with him.Dear Abby,
I’ve suspected that my husband has been fooling around, and when confronted with the evidence, he denied everything and said it would never happen again.Dear Abby,
I joined the Navy to see the world. I’ve seen it. Now how do I get out?Dear Abby,
My forty year old son has been paying a psychiatrist $50.00 an hour every week for two and a half years. He must be crazy.Dear Abby,
I was married to Bill for three months and I didn’t know he drank until one night he came home sober.Dear Abby,
My mother is mean and short tempered I think she is going through mental pause.Dear Abby,
You told some woman whose husband had lost all interest in sex to send him to a doctor. Well, my husband lost all interest in sex and he is a doctor. Now what do I do?
I hope you have a great Monday. Now I have some blog reading (and posting) to catch up on.
The article, 
I’ve never attended a single funeral that included the person’s stuff. I’ve never seen a casket holding the dearly departed lying next to a casket with that person’s stuff. Why do we not see this? Maybe it’s because when we leave this world, our stuff doesn’t go with us.
Most everyone I know falls in the ‘under $75K’ income bracket. Yet, most everyone I know is extremely happy. Happy with their lives; with where they are in their lives. Granted, I don’t know 450,000 people. But I do know quite a number of folks who don’t make that much money. And they are happy. We don’t make that much money, and we are happy. Last year, 2009, our income was under $20,000. The recession hit us hard, very hard. We were broke. Hubby had a heart attack in the midst of it (health related, not circumstance related). Yet we were… you guessed it… happy. We were happy to have each other; happy to have our family; happy to have our kids; and most of all, happy to have God providing for us. Our happiness has no connection to our wallets, at all. We weren’t any happier when our income was in the $60K range than we were last year. In fact, we weren’t as happy.
That’s a complete contradiction to the study in this article. For us, personally, when our income dropped, our happiness increased. Why? Because we were forced to focus on what was good in our lives. We were forced to focus on each other. We were forced to focus on our blessings. And what wonderful blessings they are!
But what happens when a life-long friend does betray you? What happens when the very trust that friendship has been based on is shattered at its core? What happens when someone you love, as if they are a part of your family, hurts you so deeply that you can feel your heart breaking?
But there’s the life-long friend too- the other ‘best friend’. The one you’ve told your secrets to—secrets that you can’t tell your husband because maybe those secrets include or are about him. The one you talk to about things that bother you when you can’t confide those things to your husband. The one you’ve opened your heart to—who occupies that space right next to the one you’ve given your lifelong commitment to. Where do you turn when that friend has violated the very friendship you have cherished for so long? How do you get past such a betrayal?
It’s good to have friends, of course, but why invest so much in a ‘friendship’ when it could easily slap you in the face at any second? Why allow someone to reach the foot of the pedestal when in all reality, there is no way they can ever step up to it? That’s not a realistic approach to friendship—and it’s where I found myself with this one. Unrealistic expectations… if we expect too much, we doom the friendship from the beginning. We can demand honestly, loyalty, and discretion. But we can’t demand perfection. It’s unfair and unrealistic to do so. To expect perfection out of a friend, is to say that we are perfect ourselves, and we’re not by a long shot. So why put such demands on someone we call friend?
