I have a whole list of friends who...if I met today...I don't think I'd be friends with.

There's a vitality and energy to people that causes them to evolve and revolve and dissolve and reemerge (the snowflake melts and becomes the water that is the life that feeds the flower). Not all people reemerge as flowers.

In all fairness, I've definitely had moments where I lost myself. But as moments pass to years, my list seems to have such little hope.

Closing my eyes I see all these memories, meaningful conversations, real progress towards becoming truly alive and joyful, yet social security numbers are mostly all that has stayed the same about them. Once they were people I loved very much, and now there's no common ground.

One youth group girl asked me the other day if our imperfect attempt to be godly was all there was to Christianity. But I think that's all there is to humanity. The constant, hopeless struggle that never produces solid fruit. Relationship with God, however, is designed to be perfect, but as long as humanity holds onto us in the form of mortality, it will always cause some problems.

I've been pretty lonely for the kind of close friends I once had--people who really saw into me and invested their love in my life. I want to start a new list with some promising names on it. Names that won't feed the losses column.