The language of love

I had lunch last week with a dear friend. It was a birthday celebration long overdue. We drove up to Santa Monica and walked around the farmer's market and then had a lovely lunch at an outdoor French bistro on the promenade. 

This friend is a wonderful gift giver. What makes her a great gift giver is not that she spends a lot of money; it is because her gifts are always gifts of the heart. She listens. She takes time to make sure each gift is special to the person she is giving it to. She puts a lot of effort into her choices and, of course, they are always beautifully wrapped! And what is fun is that she loves to play along with the color of the year. In fact, you should look at what she did two years ago when the color was tangerine!

The card she made this year was from a photograph she took while vacationing in Hawaii last summer. It was one of those things you could not plan any better - and she didn't - it just happened that she had the photograph in her camera and when the new color "Orchid" was announced, she remembered she had it.

The card was gorgeous and so was the wrapping - every detail perfectly planned. But it was what she wrote inside the card that touched me the most ...

I am reading a book right now about blessing others. A line in the book perfectly describes my friend:

"Sometimes life's power shines through us, even when we do not notice. We become a blessing to others then, simply by being as we are."*

I am so blessed to have a friend like this. She speaks the language of love and is a blessing even when I am sure she has no idea. 

*(Excerpt from My Grandfather's Blessings; Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging

by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Riverhead Books, N.Y., ISBN: 1-57322-856-7 

page 195).