FRIENDSHIP’S AMAZING GRACE

admin — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:22:59 +0000

Grace can come in many forms, but is especially welcome in the form of our friends. For many years I have had a friend with whom I would go into and out of touch. A couple of years ago she re-entered my life as a consultant in my business at a very difficult time for me. I was hitting the wall in my life. After having had many wonderful spiritual experiences in my youth, I had turned toward the world, raised a family, and built a very profitable, but stressful and personally unrewarding, business. My life was as dry as the Sahara desert; my marriage was gradually disintegrating, my kids had grown and gone. My life had no center, no well of joy, no touchstone for my soul. When she reappeared in my life, in August of 2006, my friend was very valuable in completing a long-postponed project; but what she brought to the table, more than her tremendous intelligence and ability, was a great big heart. A few months after coming to work with me she met a spiritual teacher in Maui; she asked me if I wanted to come and meet her also. I was unimpressed, thinking that I already knew pretty much everything there is to know about spirituality, and everything else. Her energy, though, was intoxicating, and as I watched her transform over the next year, I began to wonder if life might still have light, and possibility.

In the midst of this, a little over a year ago my wife of 28 years gently but firmly asked me to leave. At the same time, my business began to fall apart. I felt myself slipping into a place where my life, regardless of how many years were left, was feeling over. But my friend, in her gentle, and very persistent, way, kept asking me to come to Maui to meet her teacher. Finally, last April, I came, and I found myself truly reborn. I moved to Maui in July, and I began to live my life in a very different way. I appreciate the grace in each moment for the first time in many, many years. I have an opening heart, and a very wise and wonderful spiritual teacher from whom I learn something every day.

It was my friend’s grace and love that brought me here. It was a miracle that she re-appeared in my life when she did, and a bigger miracle that she had the grit and the tenacity to bust through the wall I’d built around my heart and get me to wake up and live life again.

Richard–Maui, Hawaii

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CONNECTED ALL WAYS

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:38:32 +0000

Part 1: After 2 years of losing contact with my best friend when she moved from California to New York, I kept calling the same number and never got a response. I finally wrote on a piece of paper on my desk, “Where is Mary?” Then I put my hands up to the ceiling of my art studio and said out loud, “If Mary gets the message that I’m trying to reach her, I’ll believe in God.” The phone rang an hour later and it was Mary and all I could say was “Oh my God, oh my God!”

Part 2: Same best friend and this time I was feeling stressed about seeing her. I was not wanting to. I was visiting New York for the weekend to attend a Graphic Artist’s Guild convention. I said to my husband Fred, “I don’t want to call Mary, it was very stressful last time and I’d just like to go to the convention and fly home.” ”Fine”, he said as we entered a taxi. We told the cabby to go to SoHo to a special shop Mary had showed us when we were visiting a few years before. No sooner had I gotten out of the cab when I heard Mary’s voice calling out to me, “You were in New York and you weren’t going to call me!”

What were the chances, percentages, or probability that we could be in the most over populated city in the world and bump into each other that way and that day?!

Part 3: Mary died of anorexria and complications from pneumonia. A year went by and I was sitting in my living room realizing it was Mary’s birthday. I spoke out into the empty room “Mary, I almost forgot to wish you a happy birthday…So Happy Birthday! If you can move something to let me know you heard me, move something.”

Just then, at that exact moment, a horrible crash sounded from the back of the house…I rushed into the bathroom where a huge sea shell filled with soaps had fallen into the bathtub. It had been there for years and had never moved nor been moved. I looked all around for my cat, but he was upstairs.

Mary and I had, and probably still have, a very special relationship.

Stephanie–Maui, Hawaii

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» miracles in friendship

FRIENDSHIP’S AMAZING GRACE

CONNECTED ALL WAYS