I was having a particularly blue Monday this morning when a colleague floated into the office full of smiles and asked me how my weekend was. I told her that I had a good one and she mentioned that she’d gone onto my blogs and read a little. She said “You are very special and I don’t think you get told that enough”.This touched my spirit and my heart.It got us chatting about friendship and the importance of telling people how you feel about them.Why do we take things like this for granted? Are our lives just simply too busy? I feel it is important to verbalise how you feel but we often don’t - for reasons I can only assume make us vulnerable. Why do we not share the feelings in our heart as easily as the thoughts in our head? Do we fear others’ reactions – do we fear how they will perceive it?Verbalise it! Today!Trust your heart.Trust is essential to true friendship. We all need someone who we can share our lives, thoughts, feelings, and frustrations. We need to be able to share our deepest secrets with someone, without worrying that those secrets will end up on the Internet the next day! Failing to be trustworthy with those intimate secrets can destroy a friendship in a hurry. Faithfulness and loyalty are key to true friendship. Without them, we often feel betrayed, left out, and lonely. In true friendship, there is no back-stabbing, no negative thoughts, no turning away.It seems easier to tell our significant other, our children, our mother, father and siblings how we feel but when it comes to friendship we don’t say the words. “I love you”. Has society instilled in us that these words are for family only?Life is too short to deny your true friends these three words. We are unguarded and open with friends in our conversation, why not be unguarded in how we feel too? Tell them how much you care about them and how much you value and appreciate them. You will be pleasantly surprised at their response.“A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway.” -- Fr. Jerome Cummings
