Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Thankful 30: Kristina

During the 30 days leading up to my 30th birthday, I am posting a letter a day expressing thankfulness for someone or something that has played a major role in shaping the first 30 years of my life.




Dear Kristina,

  I stole this picture from one of your Facebook albums ... hope you don't mind. It makes me smile to see us getting ready for your wedding. Also, since I posted a ton of pictures of us in this post that I wrote back in April about our friendship, I wanted to mix it up a little with a non-posed shot.

  Do you remember during college when we'd always say to one another, "but that would be easy, wouldn't it?" That's what I think of when I think of the impact your friendship has made on my life. I think of all the times we talked about how we wished things would go or what we wanted to do, but then challenged each other to take the higher road. I think of working through tough issues and wrestling with big ideas together. College is so wonderful and so tumultuous at the same time. Those years are so much about decision-making ... being out from under parents' roofs and starting to figure out how to be on your own. Who to spend time with, how to have fun, how to maintain grades, who to become. I think that you, more than anyone else during those years, journeyed with me over that rocky terrain.

  Thank you for deep conversations, and for hard conversations. Thank you for the way your questions made me examine my own heart and relationship with the Lord. Thank you for being the other half of one of the most honest friendships I've experienced. The way we interacted with each other and dealt with conflict resolution helped prepare me for marriage. I know what I've written so far makes it sound like we have had a super serious friendship, but that is only one facet of it.

  Thank you for being my co-rugby-super-fan. I can't imagine what I would have done with all my time in college if you and I hadn't driven all over the country to watch our friends in rugby tournaments. Thank you for being one of my most creative friends and for all the fun we had with our silly talk show study sessions and sitting on the floor of dorm rooms or our duplex making collages or cards. I love remembering sitting in our room (or should I say, rooms ... we lived together in 4 different ones over the years) and journaling endlessly. I loved our silent retreats we took a few times, when we stayed in that little prayer cabin in the woods. Thank you for being so much fun to travel with - whether it was a 4 day road trip to New York (seriously, what where we thinking?) or our month-long adventure through Europe, we always had such a great time.

  Thank you for being the most constant friend throughout college and grad school, and for continuing to be a friend now. I have loved moving through the different stages of life together, and I look forward to our kids being a little bigger so they can play together and we can have a conversation that's longer than 5 minutes once again.

Love you, friend!
  Stef

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