Dinner With Real Friends

Tonight, we had our first dinner guests. It felt so good to have someone over. We've been living with my parents, then in laws, then my parents again for two years. During that time, we didn't have any company over. It was actually hard for us to make friends because of that. People would love to have us over, but we could never reciprocate the visit. People thought we weren't so interested in them and we'd  stop getting invited to things. Not to mention, the whole "living with parents" thing is a big turn off to people.

Friends for us have been hard to come by. Not only because of the living situation we've been in, but also because we're poor. We have to often turn down movie invites, concert invites, coffee invites, etc. We just don't have the extra cash to do things like that very often. We get left out a lot and haven't been able to make very close friends because of it. Most people would think friendship isn't about going places together, it's about having things in common and taking care of each other. But not really. That hanging out and going places part is actually pretty important to people - more than they probably realize.

We are so thankful for the friends God has put in our life over the past 6 months. These friends see past our situation. They love us and support us and most importantly, pray for us. It's probably those prayers that got us into this house in the first place. These friends are certainly the reason we have furnishings in our home. This is the house that love built. We didn't have much to call our own but our friends have stepped up and donated so many things to us to furnish our entire house! We went from sleeping on a sofa bed with metal bars poking us in the back to sleeping on a beautiful king size bed that we didn't pay a dime for. We are able to wash and dry our own clothes at home rather than going to a laundromat.

By these kind donations, we were even able to have our own kitchen table and chairs to share a meal on with our friends as well as the pots and pans to cook with and dishes to serve the food on. We are so blessed and grateful for these things. We are so grateful and blessed to have friends like ours.

We will be poor for a while longer and I'm sure you'll hear a lot about how we're dealing with that here on this blog. But we are only financially poor. We are so rich in everything else! We take nothing for granted.