CLOSING DOORS

 Hey 🙋🏽‍♀️🙋🏽‍♀️. 

How have you been? I'm hoping all is well with you, and if it isn't, that God helps you and fixes whatever is stressing you. 

So today, we'll be talking about letting go of friendships. I've learned that this can be one of the hardest things to do, especially if you're someone like me who finds it very hard to let go of friendships; I'd begin to think of everything we've been through, of all the memories we've shared and ask myself "how e go just end like that?" But guess what I've discovered? Sometimes it actually needs to end like that! 

One reason I believe friendships have to come to an end sometimes is because you only needed each other for a season in your lives. So there are friends you had in Secondary School without whom you may not have learnt some things, or even survived the rigours of school; for that season –your Secondary School, you needed to be friends. I personally believe that there are friends that God brings to our lives to walk through certain seasons of life with us. But most times because we do not know that these friends are only with us for a season, we struggle to keep them with us forever and that becomes toxic. How do you know a friend is only meant to be in your life for a season? I believe life will naturally begin to pull both of you to different paths, and on these new paths, you become irrelevant to each other's journey. Does that mean your friendship, wasn't true? No! What it means however, is that the time has come for you to let each other go and  cherish the memories and lessons you've learnt from each other. Too many times, we're struggling to keep people in our lives past the season God intended them to be in our lives for and the result is usually that the friendship becomes tedious and begins to ruin all the good that it meant before. And when it finally ends, you discover that the damage you've both done to yourselves will taint the beauty of the friendship as it was before when you both were relevant to each other's journey. It has happened to me before. For over two years, early 2017 to late 2019, I was struggling to keep a friendship, whose relevance had since faded, alive. It became so tedious but I was willing to keep at it because to me it didn't make sense that after everything we've been through, the friendship would just end like that. After struggling for 2 years and becoming so bitter about the friendship that I almost forgot how God used this friend to help me, I decided to cut the friendship, and both of us, loose. Of course I was sad, cried for a few days sef. But in the end, after the bitterness had faded away, I was able to remember with fondness all that the friendship meant to me, and then I understood! God only put him in my life and me in his for a season! That season ended in 2017 but for two years, I kept pushing for something that Heaven had brought to an end. Now, I know and am grateful for the help we were to each other in the season that we needed to be in each other's lives and I'm glad that we could be there for each other. Almost three years later, the bitterness that I put on myself has washed away and I can clearly appreciate the friendship for what it was.  

Pheew! I hope you found this educative and that it spurs you to critically analyse your friendships and know when to cut them loose. I must caution however that, as you close the doors on a friendship, be gentle; you never know when those doors will need to be open again, seasons change after all. And in the moment where you need to revisit those doors, what will determine whether or not the doors will open up to you, will be how you closed the doors in the first place. 

As this month and the quarter ends, I encourage you to evaluate how you've done in the last three months, things that have happened to you, goals you've acheived and those you haven't, and learn what you need to do better as we enter the new month and quarter. 

Till next time. 

Love, 

Achenyo.