just minishorts.

Its not that I have grown wiser, its just that time has given me the realization that we select the adjectives we put to our statuses.

I am your true friend. I am your best friend. I am your loving friend. I am your busybody friend. I am your caring friend. I am your forgiving friend. I am your giving friend. I am your occasional friend. I am your greedy friend.

In the same way we could reverse the structures of the sentences and provide the definitions for another person.

You are a terrible friend. You are a best friend. You are a trustworthy friend. You are a sensitive friend. You are an unreliable friend. You are a tiring friend. You are a lousy friend.

We seem to get ourselves into knots each time we choose to reinforce into ourselves the kind of standards that we've been performing up to. It was only in these recent days that I realize that rather than allowing us to appreciate more the beauty and wonder of who our friends were, we were constantly placing impossible quantifiers and qualifiers to the kind of characters that we expected our loved ones to perform for us.

I can write it like this, because this is a constant struggle. I walk into an office and I say, this is the best job I've ever had. I look at my staff and I know how to say that person A is more reliable than person B, person C is the most efficient person I know. And each time I tell those things to myself, I further reinforce the belief that B is simply not reliable, and thus not allowing her the opportunity of ever raising the bar for herself.

These labels I've put to the people around in my life, they're such judgemental and impossible standards that I've placed upon them, all for the sake of satisfying my own judge-o-meter of who's best and who's worst.

So this is it. I am your friend. And you are my friend. And therefore, I will accept nothing more, and I will give nothing less. Whether you like it or not, I take the responsibility in fulfilling my duties, I will make this stand for you to be your friend, adjectives, qualifiers, standards not accepted. Because the moment I start living by anyone's definitions of good and bad, I start confusing myself and deviating myself from the ultimate role God has placed me in: to be A FRIEND.

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And a friend will have to say what he has to say because he cares. You felt hurt because it was true, you felt I was insensitive because I was honest. And honesty always hurts.

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I loved this Psalm long before I chose to accept my father's faith as my own. As a younger agnostic, searching teenager when I used to flip through Dad's bible, I used to hate the stories in it, in the times I chose to believe that God was evil because He allowed me to be born into a broken family. In recent weeks that I've considered the experiences that He has led me to encounter, I realized truly just how blessed I am to be be built just the way I am, and just how wonderfully and fearfully we have all be made in His image. That potential for growth to become just like Him just makes the whole concept of it logical. Of course carrying the cross is going to be difficult, you think being crucified easy meh?

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