It can cut you to the quick, or it can provide the most amazing love, inspiration and intimacy you may know in a lifetime. If you love a friend with a vulnerable sharing of your lives, your marriages, your family ups and downs, you put yourself at risk in a way you cannot imagine. There is so much that women have to give and receive from one another, and there is a strength and  quiet courage that they can supply that is beyond measure. It requires a trust that, should it ever be betrayed, can leave one open and bleeding as if they were on the operating table having bypass surgery and the surgeon decided to go play a round of golf before closing them up.

You don’t know if you can survive it, it hurts that badly and for so long. In fact,when he returns, were you conscious, you would ask him to just give you a transplant instead, because you aren’t sure you can ever repair the wound to your heart by yourself.

You can‘t. I have been through that situation. My husband left me for my best friend, some thirty years ago, actually. I share this not because it is painful now, but because it is one of the most joyous stories of my life, and a cornerstone to my relationship with God through His healing.

Building a life with my children with that resentment and bitterness continually opening a wound, I finally came to a place where I told God I was willing to be willing to forgive them. I could not muster the courage to actually say I was willing to forgive. But God in His great and tender mercy, took my baby step and turned it into a new and improved friendship. Still deep and still vulnerable, we met each other after that decision on a kind of bridge that, in my artist’s mind, looked like it was out of  a Monet painting: an oriental type bridge over a water garden filled with brilliant water lilies in the pond below.

Our pond was truly more like a sewer of bad memories and of hurting each other, so we never went near it. We met above it, and admired the water lilies that were flourishing there. My sister recently shared with me, when we were awestruck by the beauty of some water lilies by the side of the road, that they will only grow in mud.

I like to think that even though there was a lot of mudslinging going on for years, that our children still bloomed in the mud and even, with God’s intervention, because of it.

My best friend, Dottie, died of colon cancer five years after God restored our friendship, now made even deeper because of the place God had carved into our hearts. He filled that place with love and a sharing that only two women who have been married to the same man could ever know. I was able to comfort her in ways that only I could, having totally let go of any mean thoughts I had ever had about either of them. Only love remained.

Her only daughter is now my daughter. She and I share loving memories of her Mom and God’s love for all of us on an almost weekly basis. I have been blessed more than I could ever imagine by that baby step I took with God over ten years ago. It freed both our families and so many other people who knew that only God could have performed that intricate surgery.

I share this only to remind you that given the opportunity to have a deep friendship, please take it. It is a blessing you will never regret… unless, of course, you are too proud to take baby steps.

P.S. This picture is the first one I could find, taken at our son’s graduation from college. She was beautiful even with her eyes closed, and this was taken near the same time as our reconciliation.