Soul Friends...

I am not a quality time person. At all. I can think of 23 inventions I love more than my phone.  Answering the phone is one of my weaknesses.  Spending hours upon hours with the same purpose is also not my forte. In fact, it's the opposite of my forte.  These qualities sometimes make it difficult to be close to friends who excel at long phone calls and epic hang out marathons.  I have been blessed in my life to have a few soul friends.  Soul friends are the kind of friends that understand your soul.  They don't require anything of you except to be you.  They take the unedited, no makeup, emotional, unstable, unabridged you and know every weakness and decide that they love you anyway.  They are the kind of friend that even if you went to the Chateu de 'If like in Count of Monte Cristo and didn't see them, stalk their facebook page or hear a single word from them for years, would make no difference when you finally saw them again because you would pick up right where you ended and the truth is, those kind of friendships never end. They only get better and deeper with time.  I have concluded that those kind of friends are next to family and my husband, life's most beautiful and important blessing.   

 Liz Kennedy Williams is one of those friends in my life.  Seeing the Lincoln memorial was nice, sleeping at Liz's designer apartment, soaking up her life, humor, love, and example was a far more inspiring and  significant memorial to what life is, and what I want to become more like.

I suppose our friend CS Lewis had a little something to say regarding this topic that I love.  Without further adieu, I turn the time over to Clive Staples himself:

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."

My survival on this planet has been given more value than the hope diamond we saw in the Smithsonian, by such people in my life.  I agree with his quote except for I have come to know that even though we don't have the same DNA, get sealed in the temple, and never write on each other's face book walls, soul friends ARE necessary to my survival and the value my life experience down here. 

Soul friends don't change because you get married, have babies and get love handles, move to the other side of the country or forget their birthday.  Soul friends are the kind of friends that you can call and you don't have to explain yourself because they already know you, the real you, they are the kind of friends you can call and cry or complain like the female version Laman and Lemuel combined and know that you will not get judged, they are the friends you can call and talk for endless hours about nothing and gut laugh with; they are the friends that you can say nothing to and be completely not funny and boring as toast without jam or butter and they could care less.  When you find a soul friend, it doesn't matter how long you have known them because it's just a connection your soul has and you feel like you've known them for your whole life because you let them into your whole life, even the ugly, unattractive, lame, boring, not clean crevices of your life that the rest of the world will never know.  Soul friends are the kind of people that if you had to go across the plains in a handcart wearing and ugly bonnet and eating flour mush cooked over buffalo chip poop fire, you know you could do it if they were in the same company with their ugly bonnet too.  When you find a soul friend, you never let them go because they are one of life's rarest and greatest blessings.  You never know where or when you will meet one, but you know when you have because your life is never the same after that. 


I love the CS Lewis quote because I'm sure I could keep breathing and my aortic valve would keep pumping if my soul friends all died; but my survival would lack the depth, color, joy and peace that I feel just knowing that somewhere in the world, they are there.