I wasn't told, were you?

The word support continues to swirl through my thoughts.
I think of how the women before me used this word. There were many pearls of wisdom we all wished our mothers might have shared with us about what it meant to be a woman, not a girl. What we might need to get through each day, despite what we thought the day might be like.
No generation invented friends who became critically ill, friends whose faced each day in a marriage that was like living on Mars, friends who needed financial help, friends who suffered from depression, friends whose child would never "straighten up and fly right". It is in everyone's world; maybe it is happening to you.
Somewhere in the annals of my memory, there are times I saw and overheard those women friends talking to each other about the pain in their lives and how it was good to talk to someone right then. Someone who would come when the bottom fell out and needed someone to help clean up what had left litter all around. I knew my mother was praying for her friends and sisters. I obviously learned something in watching and listening.
Support is being there. Asking the question when someone calls (not emails) "Is everything alright?" Never diminish the power of the human voice.
Often everything is not all right. It can be a topsy turvy day, week, month, year, years. Be prepared to have something happen which can turn your world upside down, inside out.
Friends trust us with the most intimate parts of their lives. When they need us, they truly need us. Stay tuned and know all the powers of the faith you embrace are there to guide you when you are called upon by a friend.
I was never told by women, of the generation of my mother, how they stayed standing when they often had been falling through pain and confusion and complexity. They stood in magnificent grace; but they never told me the secret to their balance.