Circle of Friends

This years MOPS theme is "Together on Planet Mom" and it deals a lot with community.  We talked about it this morning at our steering meeting.  It's so important to make people feel like they have a community to belong too, both near by and online.  It got me thinking about the devotions that I had signed up to do in a few weeks.  Community is so important and after spending 4 years in college, 4 years moving about during seminary, and one year finally staying put I think I've got a handle on the community thing.  All you need to know is that it's important.  

All this talk about community got me thinking of my circle of friends.  About 4 years I sat down with a group of seminary spouses and we read "Captivating".  It was a good book and something has stuck with me even after all this time.  The amazing thing about our group was that we were all at different places.  A few were waiting for calls and had graduated already, some, like me, were waiting to head out on internship, and others were just waiting for middler year to start.  We were some of the few left on campus and took advantage of that.  The part of the book that stuck with me even after all this time is the part about your circle of friends.  We all have a circle of friends and our friends move from one "ring" to another depending on the situations and times in our life.  The author said that like Jesus, you can really only have 2 to 3 intimate good friends.  Then you have your next layer which for Jesus would have been his disciples, after that is the rings of everyone else you know.  The neat thing is that people move from place to place.  I like that idea.  After moving so much and my life changing it's nice to know that a friend is a friend, but it's okay if our relationship changes with what's going on in our life.  I will always have those close friends, but they might change and I need to embrace that.  I can't spend all of my energy trying to keep intimate friends that maybe need to move to an outer ring or push away friends that I could truly connect with in my intimate friendship ring because I'm scared of who's place they will take.  It's okay to say "they were a good friend in college or seminary, but now it's different".  I still keep in touch with a lot of people, but not in the same way.  Community needs to change and we need to remember that a friend can always move around our rings and they are still an important part of our life.