we are not meant to live alone

"Share your life with the people you love, even if it means saving up for a ticket and going without a few things for a while to make it work. There are enough long lonely days of the same old thing, and if you let enough years pass, and if you let the routine steamroll your life, you'll wake up one day, isolated and weary, and wonder what happened to all those old friends. You'll wonder why all you share is Christmas cards, and why life feels lonely and bone-dry. We were made to live connected and close, as close as we all were for those few days in Alameda, holding one another's babies, taking turns stirring whatever's on the stove.

So walk across the street, or drive across town, or fly across the country, but don't let really intimate loving friendships become the last item on a long to-do list. Good friendships are like breakfast. You think you're too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky halfway through the day, and discover that your attempt to save time totally backfired. In the same way, you can try to go it alone because you don't have time or because your house is too messy to have people over, or because making new friends is like the very worst parts of dating. But halfway through a hard day or a hard week, you'll realize in a flash that you're breathtakingly lonely, and that the Christmas cards aren't much company. Get up, make a phone call, buy a cheap ticket, open your front door.

Because there really is nothing like good friends, like the sounds of their laughter and the tones of their voices and the things they teach us in the quietest, smallest moments."

-Shauna Niequist

I love Shauna's books. You could read them every year and learn something new about life/yourself from the year before. I am definitely in a different place than I was the first time I read Bittersweet. I am pregnant and moving out of my first home, two huge life altering things and they are happening at the same time. Also, two things she has experienced and has written about. The excerpt above was a great reminder to me of why we are moving in the first place. We love the people God has brought into our lives so why wouldn't we want to be closer to them? To be able to walk to each others' house whenever we want. I don't take offense but I've come to realize when you live 20 minutes away from everyone you're not the first person they think about hanging out with. I know I've missed out on spontaneous girl time and Joel doesn't get to run with our guy friends as often as he'd like. These things may seem small but like Shauna writes, we are not meant to be alone and especially now I am realizing these men and women we have been blessed to meet are our family. They can't replace our actual relatives but for this short time in our lives we get to do life with them. How special is that? People that would not hesitate to stop what they are doing in a moments notice to help you. These kind of people are rare and if you get a chance to be near them, you take it.