A deep friendship warms your soul, stays with you for life | Opinion

I don’t know about you, but true friendship is like a good hot cup of coffee, early in the morning. It feels so good when its warmth permeates your body and seeps into your soul, waking you up. That’s how true friendship feels to me.

The subject of friendship came to mind recently when I thought about how blessed I am to be surrounded with such wonderful people. (I won’t start calling names because I am afraid that I will leave someone out.) But you know who you are.

Over the years, I have been blessed with many wonderful friends, of different races and cultures, who proved themselves to be real, honest-to-goodness friends. Sometimes our politics don’t match, but that’s OK. Still, such friends are my support system. They never point me in the wrong direction. They always have my back, making sure I look good.

As I reflect on friendship and its meaning, I admit I have been fooled many times by people I thought were my friends.

While this doesn’t happen often, the moment of revelation when you know you’ve made a severe mistake in taking such a person into your heart is a pain that is unmeasurable. But you get through it. And you are thankful that the betrayal was on them, not on you.

I am blessed to still have several childhood friends in my life, who have grown old with me. One is my friend Nellie Dorsett Green, who will be 92 on May 1, God willing. Nellie isn’t doing so great health wise. But we still talk and thank the Lord that we are still in our “right mind.”

I have written many times about the friendship between Nellie’s family and mine. The Dorsetts were the first family we met when Momma moved to Miami with me and my brother Adam in April 1944. I was 6 and Nellie was going to be 10 the next month.

Back then, I was the “little girl” wanting to play with Nellie and her friends. But they would gently shoo me away, saying I was “too young” to be in their conversation, which was mostly about boys.

As I grew up, other friends entered my life. I was 11 when Willie Mae Stephens Whitman and I became friends. We were on the playground at Liberty City Elementary during recess when she asked me if I would attend church with her one Sunday. I was delighted. And so was my mom. Willie Mae and her family attended New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Liberty City.

I attended Ebenezer United Methodist Church in Overtown at 10th Street and Third Avenue, which was several miles away. Attending Sunday services meant we had to take Bus #21 to get from Liberty City to Overtown to church.

Willie Mae’s invitation to come to church with her, which was in walking distance, was the beginning of a friendship that introduced me the Children’s Choir in her church and later being baptized in a rock pit in Opa-locka on a cold February Sunday morning.

I can still hear Mother Hughey (Willie Mae’s grandmother and the mother of the church) singing in her deep contralto voice:

“Take me to the waaa-ta, take me to the waaa-ta, take me to the waaa-ta, to be baptized…”

As she sang, the late Rev. James Brown dipped me in the chilly water so fast I hardly knew what happened. Mother Hughey was there when I came up, waiting with a warm flannel blanket to wrap around my wet body.

Life goes on. Childhood friends move in and out of our life. But the bond is never really broken. Life just gets in the way at times.

But it’s because of my childhood friendships, friendships that lasted into my adulthood, that I often found it hard to believe that some people could pretend to be your friend, but really were your enemy.

It is at such times that your own friendship to that person is tested. If you are a friend, indeed, you learn to forgive. But you also learn to “feed” such a person with a long-handle spoon, as Momma used to say. You learn how to guard your heart by loving them from a distance.

As a young widow, newly saved, I was surrounded by older women in my church who mothered me and taught me how to live as a “good” Christian woman. But I was lonely for friendship with women my age. One day I had the nerve to ask one of them if we could be friends. Her answer was “no,” because I hadn’t “grown enough in the Lord.”

I was so hurt. But I moved on.

Another time I reached out to someone I thought didn’t “take” to me too well. I really wanted to be her friend. And a couple of times we even went out to lunch together. But I guess I just wasn’t the kind of friend she wanted. One day, she stood me up.

Now, I am one who is quite skeptical when someone tells me God spoke to them. But as I sat in my car, waiting for her that day, I heard a sweet voice saying, “You don’t have to beg anyone to be your friend; I am your friend.”

I knew, instantly, it was the voice of the Lord, comforting me as only He can. That day, the need to “beg” for friendship was taken from me. I believe the Lord, Himself, has gifted me with wonderful people who have proved to be genuine friends. But it was also through such disappointments that I learned the beauty and power of forgiveness.

I am thankful for my friends who, as I said before, are like the comfort of a good hot cup of coffee in the morning. Just thinking of you, my friends, warms my heart and help to make my day.

You are the friends who tell me when I am wrong, who also lift me up and keep me encouraged when I sometimes find it hard to keep on keeping on.

I am a blessed woman because of friends like you.