One is Silver

Does anybody remember the Girl Scout song: "Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other's gold"? We used to sing that while we made an arch by standing in two rows, facing each other, holding hands over the middle, and then took turns walking down the center under everyone's clasped hands). If you were ever in somebody's basement wearing a sash covered with little embroidered circles and gluing pompoms to egg cartons, you know what I mean.

I think I made a new friend today. I had been praying for this. Wherever I have lived, including Washington (ahem, Andrew!), I have been blessed with really great friends. And I do mean blessed--I've realized more and more as I grow older how rare and precious it is to have people who will walk through your whole life with you, never faltering, and offer you the gift of themselves. I don't want to take that for granted, and I am praying to have even more of it in my life.

It has not always been thus. I was painfully shy as a child. Once when I was about 4, I was standing around with my parents in this store (Farm and Family Center--the name tells you something about where I grew up). My dad had bumped into a friend of his, and I was too shy to look at the adults as they stood around talking. I wrapped my arms around my dad's legs and buried my face into his knees. I looked down. First disbelief, then mortification dawned on me: "Those are not my daddy's shoes."

I had grabbed the legs of the stranger.

In spite of such inauspicious beginnings, I had to learn to overcome my shyness because I was put in lots of social situations where I didn't know anybody, and it got a lot easier. Today I went out to lunch with a woman in my department who is interesting, honest, funny, smart--just terrific. I had been chatting with her the other day and asked her if she ever wanted to get lunch (because I had always thought she seemed really great--my only reservation had been that I didn't want her to feel obligated to go with me because I was new and therefore potentially a charity case). But she welcomed it, and we planned it right there. And then today, as we were walking back, she said, "I'm so glad you asked me to lunch. I would never have asked you--I'm way too shy." I was floored; her social skills are so good that you'd never have guessed it. But it was so easy, so blessed.