Winnie is wise in the ways of friendship

by Mary Regina Morrell

“The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.” ~ Pearl S. Buck

My house is situated on the corner of a street that has always hosted an elementary school bus stop. A person can get a lot of story material just from watching what happens among the children who gather there everyday.

Today was no different.

As I struggled to get all my groceries out of the trunk of my car I noticed the big yellow bus pulling around the corner to stop almost in front of me. A young child wearing the bright orange "badge" of the safety patrol across his chest, de-boarded and moved around to the passenger side of his waiting car. He looked very sad, and before opening the door cast a stealth, furtive glance up at the bus windows.

There, behind the glass, another young child sat with head down before glancing tentatively out the window toward him. As the bus began to pull away the young child at the car seemed to make a quick decision, smiled meekly and waved. Though I couldn't see the child in the window anymore it was obvious the response was in kind for the young boy on the ground broke into a wide smile, beaming like a lit-Christmas tree. They exchanged some kind of symbolic hand wave and a new and happy child entered the car for his trip home.

Friends can have that effect on us.

They light us up from the inside out because they make us feel loved. It is easy to understand why St. John Chrysostom wrote: "A friend is dearer to us than the light of heaven, for it would be better for us that the sun were extinguished than that we should be without friends."

But it was the famous sage, Winnie the Pooh, who best described what had happened between these two young school friends on this particular day: "You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes."

If not for the initiative taken by a sad safety patrol officer, two friends would have gone home hurt and unhealed. Instead, because one reached out to the other in hope and trust, the two went home happy, knowing that they were important to someone else.

And don't we learn the same lesson from Scripture when the woman with a hemorrhage, though frightened, takes the initiative and touches Jesus’ cloak, believing that gesture alone would heal her?

Jesus’ himself affirms her, saying, “Courage, daughter! Your faith has saved you.”

Reaching out to others in love requires a certain amount of trust and courage and often includes a little bit of humbling thrown in for good measure.

But when we recall how our lives may be transformed by the love of others, the rewards certainly outweigh the risks.