Friends | Staci Wilder Page 3

Archive for the 'Friends' Category

July 5, 2007 @ 12:36 pm | Filed under: Friends

Nathan & ChaCha

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June 13, 2007 @ 7:56 am | Filed under: Friends

The older I become the more appreciative I am of the true girl friends that fill my life.

While I’m not old, I’ve certainly lived long enough to recognize the futility that comes hand-in-hand with senseless competitiveness and desperate struggles to be everything you think your friend (or neighbor or sister or cousin or even a perfect stranger) is.

As I begin my cruise through mid-life I am thankful for the great group of gals that surround me. They praise my strengths and tolerate my idiosyncracies. They cry with me and laugh with me. They know I’m not perfect and yet they’re okay with that. My secrets, hopes, and dreams are buried in the vaults that are their hearts. My name is safe on their lips.

It hasn’t always been this way and – because of that – I am so thankful for this stage in my life. It takes a while to see the world and our place in it with clarity. It takes even longer to understand that no one can fill our exact place, just as we cannot even begin to fill someone else’s. We’re unique, God’s Originals.

The reality is that we, as women, tend to wear veneers, whether thick or thin, that shield our vulnerabilities and present only the "pretty" side of ourselves. The side we want others to see. The side WE choose, not necessarily the portrait of the woman God created us to be.

A few years back I made a very conscious decision to remove myself from the pettiness that we women sometimes fall prey to. I became very aware that most women are not so much unlike…me. We come in all shapes, all sizes, all makes and models, but the essentials are very familiar.

We need to be loved, appreciated, respected…all of these, for sure. But what we need more than anything is TO love. To love without boundaries, without limits, without expectations. To truly love is the greatest gift and women are abundantly endowed with it. We’re nurturers by nature and, yet, so often we fail to nurture and support one another.

We’re a sisterhood and our strongest ally is most likely standing right by our side. But she may too shy, too opinionated, too angry, or too – goofy, even – to approach. Even so, I have a feeling that her heart beats much the same as mine does. I’m quite sure that her arms shelter someone much as my own do, and that her eyes drip tears of joy and sadness and pain…exactly as my eyes do.

She has hurts and disappointments. Pride and shame. Strengths and weaknesses. Irritating habits and endearing characteristics . She is my sister. My friend. My neighbor. The woman next to me in line at Target. She is the young girl that sits next to me in history class and she is the elderly woman that I pass weekly at church.

I may not always know her name.

But I pray I always see her.

She’s not all that different from me.

An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walks from the stream to the house, the cracked pot often arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been created to do.

After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. "I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house."

The old woman smiled, "Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side?"

"That’s because I have always known about flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them. For two years I have been able to put beautiful flowers on my table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace my home."

Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it’s the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding.

You’ve got to just take each person for what they are and expect the good.

For all of my cracked-pot friends – whether I know your name, just recognize you by sight, or quite possibly have not even met you yet – have a great day and remember to smell the flowers on YOUR side of the path!

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May 31, 2007 @ 4:16 pm | Filed under: Friends,Soul Food,The Solid Rock

Forty-eight hours ago, I sat in a doctor’s waiting room, nervously and mindlessly flipping through the worn and smudged pages of one magazine after another. For two solid hours I sat in that black vinyl chair, all the while my heart was somewhere in the depths of that doctor’s office, in whatever room Nate was in.

As a half-hour turned to one, then an hour and a half came and went, I gave up all pretenses of reading or people-gazing or anything else that one tends to do in those type of settings. I gathered my purse and moved to the edge of my seat, and was truly only a nano-second away from barging behind The Door and finding my son all on my own.

And then these words begin to spill through my mind in the sweetest possible way:

"Peace, peace. Wonderful peace."

"Coming down, from the Father above."

Just like that my twirling thoughts stilled and my pulse returned to normal. Even though I sat here, in the one place, facing the one thing that I feared most during my kids’ growing up years, I felt the peace of God. I wish that I could control heredity, that I could somehow shelter both boys from the pains and trials of life, whether it be physical, mental, spiritual, or emotional. And yet – just as I could only sit with them held firmly in my lap during those awful visits for shots, for ear infections, for chicken pox – now I could only sit in a lonely chair in the waiting room, knowing that my firstborn was on his own this time. Besides my presence and my prayers, I was helpless.

"Peace, peace. Wonderful peace."

"Coming down, from the Father above."

Again, that peace moved through me, smooth and undeniable. See, those words had recently been sung in my living room, around my own piano, just the day before. Some of our best friends had gathered in our home for a Memorial Day lunch. After eating, chatting, celebrating a birthday, and laughing the afternoon away, we became serious. One of our own was going in for a medical procedure, a grave one, and though little was said about it, it was on all of our minds. His wife had received her miracle just months before and now we, as a solid group of friends, were standing on the promise of one for him. As we prepared to gather in a circle around him and pray before everyone left, Rochelle sat down at the piano and the girls and I stood around, harmonizing as she began to play the first, soft strains of this very song.

Little did I know that the words would minister to me in such a mighty way just hours later.

By the time Nate emerged from The Door, my mother’s heart was warm with the knowledge that – though I have very little control these days – my God has all control. He is my peace. Even later, as we pulled into the driveway and I grabbed the mail from the mailbox, I felt that rich flood of "it’s going to be all right." Even after I slid open the envelope from my publisher and learned the news that the editorial board had decided to not publish Finding Faith this fall, after all – still I felt that peace.

I stood in the living room, clutching the single crisp sheet of paper, feeling my husband’s eyes on me, and knowing he was waiting for the waterworks to begin. I, too, waited for the barage of disappointment to come, for the feeling of rejection that even the most politely worded letter of its kind tends to produce in a writer’s gut.

Nothing. Except this,

"Sweep over my spirit, forever I pray,

in fathomless billows of love."

Whether it was the nights lately spent at the Rock, or merely the recognition of priorities after my day in the waiting room, I felt nothing except peace.

I don’t understand a lot of things. I don’t understand how a mother’s heart can possibly bear some of the things it must endure. I don’t understand why heredity can be, both, so glorious and yet at times, so mean. I don’t understand why contracts are broken, why publishers make the decisions they do, or even why I continue to write and worry and mother and care about each and every single little detail in this life of mine.

I don’t understand.

But I have the peace that passes all understanding. And, really, that’s everything.

Far away in the depths of my spirit tonight
Rolls a melody sweeter than psalm;
In celestial-like strains it unceasingly falls
O’er my soul like an infinite calm.