"No New Friends"

For most people, a new year’s resolution tends to focus on losing weight, eating right, working out more, getting out of debt, finishing school, etc. Most years I don’t even attempt to make a new year’s resolution, for it typically means the death of whatever I hoped to accomplish. For example, this year I chose not to make a new year’s resolution, yet still decided to coincidentally start counting calories on January 1st. Needless to say, two weeks later I was no longer counting those calories.

A few years ago, I made a different sort of New Year’s Resolution. This particular year, I choose to make the resolution to “make no new friends". Typing that out makes it seem really awful. What kind of person chooses to make such a declaration? How could a person like that have any credibility in blogging about loving one’s neighbor? Honestly, to this day I’m not sure if it was the right decision to make. Maybe it should have been worded differently.

What would lead someone to say that they didn’t want to make any new friends? It may have been because there was a trail of good friends and family who were often pushed to the wayside, when the needs of others took precedent day after day. I wasn’t really loving those neighbors who were closest to me. On the outside people saw this person who would drop whatever she was doing to help people, but was left with friends who were hurt when I double booked myself. And a family who only received the little that was left after I served people all day long.

If any of you read my blog about “I Love You Always, I Like You Sometimes”, you probably wouldn’t be shocked that these happened about the same time. I was so busy focusing on the needs of people I barely knew that my close friends and family were getting the raw end of the deal.

What I saw happening when I reflected on the past year and was looking forward to a new year was that while I was pouring my energy into the many, I had nothing left to give to those closest to me. As we go about trying to love our neighbor, looking at those that we come in contact with on a regular basis, let us not neglect the neighbors closest to us. It’s the perfect place to start, a great launching pad to then continue to open our hearts to those other neighbors who may just be passing through.