I am blessed. As a single, 28-year-old Christian woman who longs for marriage and children, it’s very easy to find trials in life. Time to start that precious family of husband and children seems to slip through your fingers with each passing day. You count the years that you grow older with the number of children you could have had by now, if only you would have met the man God intended for you about the time you were twenty-one. You wonder why so many girls who never seemed interested in families and marriage by now have long since found loving husbands at their side, while you are still trying to perfect your domestic skills alone. It’s so... easy to slip into the trap of bemoaning your fate in life and focussing every single prayer on ‘Please God, let me find my husband NOW”.

And still I say: I am blessed. While in His wisdom God sees it fit for me to be single-–for now or forever--He has given me something instead to focus my love upon. Having no brothers and sisters, loneliness might have lurked around the corner were it not for this great, magnificent gift: friendship.

I am blessed in having friends and in being a friend. As a girl, reading books of girls and their "best friends," I prayed for a friend like that to share giggles with and stories and secrets. If I had known what a gift such a friend would be in reality, I might have prayed even harder. I was lucky in finding that first friend when I was fifteen: an awkward teenager who never fit in with any group or with anybody. And after that first friendship, slowly and steadily, the group grew in size, in age, in diversity.

On a website I recently read a lovely tale about a yellow shirt that became the object of a game between mother and daughter, in which they kept returning it to each other in the most funny and secretive ways: hiding it in clothing boxes, taping it under tables, embroiderying “I belong to...“ on it, and so on. It made me smile, because I could easily imagine sharing such games with my own mother or my friends. The youngest one of my friends is 14 and one of the most sensible and kind people I know. The oldest is 74, wise and gentle. In between there is a host of men and women with whom I share my life.

Some live close by, like that friend of 13 years ago that I still see every week or more. We finish each other's sentences, share secrets with a look, have a whole vocubulary of our own in which words take a different meaning, and we have shared more tears and laughter together than any amount of movies could ever produce.

Some friends live at what seems to be the other side of the world. There are people I have met over the Internet, whom I slowly get the gift of meeting them in reality--people from the US, from Australia, from Canada--couples and singles, of the same age or distinctly younger or older.

If I spoke of "Hallmark" friendships, I would do them no justice, because no greeting card ever encompassed a friendship in which an entire website of people from three different continents bend together over the question of whether or not the new studio should be done in warm, earthy tones, or in fresh white and lavender. And no movie of the week ever described the simple love that has someone on the other side of the world spend days and weeks on making an entire quilt in precisely those colours just so she can surprise you.

Friendship is a funny apron with Christmas trees on it that’s worn the whole year round. It’s sending postcards as well as e-mails, because you know how much fun it is to find something real in the mailbox. Friendship is laughter and tears, and, above all, it is sharing. It’s a sharing of joy, sorrow, certainties, and doubts--a sharing of yourself with all your qualities and faults.

There was a time when, at exquisite moments of my life, there was this silent pain within me while I thought: “If only I could share this now. If only I now had a husband to share this with.” I have no husband yet. But those special moments are shared a thousandfold with people who are such precious gifts from God that they do not leave room for pain over the lack. In learning how to become a wife, I have learned first how to become a friend. If one day I do find a husband, he will find both in me. If God decides it is His will for me to remain single, I will always have this expanding treasurechest of friends, a precious gift that surrounds my single self with a constant reflection of His love.

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