Throughout our lives, there is rarely anything so important to us as acceptance. In school or at church there is the "popular" group, and everyone, or nearly everyone, wants to be in it. Even if we are not "popular", we all want to have friends. The feeling of being accepted by someone; known for who we are, and yet still loved, is something each one of us yearns for.

In our quest for acceptance and friends, we fail to realize how painful and difficult friendships can be. When you finally have a friend, there is a short time of carefree elation, but then the work begins. Maintaining a real friendship takes time and commitment. There is always joy and happiness to be found with your friends, but a times, the cost may be high.

During the course of a relationship, there are ups and downs. One moment, you and your friend may be very close; the next, you feel remote. One day, you may talk for hours, and then the next, you suddenly have nothing to say to each other. Sometimes, the closeness returns. And sometimes, you keep growing further and further apart until your friend is lost from you forever. When you first start to lose your friend, you go through a stage of denial. Eventually, when you come to accept the fact that your friendship will never be what it once was, you feel intensely sorrowful.

I will never forget when I first realized how distant my friend Elyse was becoming. At first, I wrote it off as imagination, but as time went on, I learned to accept the fact that she no longer wanted to be my friend. On the night I fully realized that, I cried myself to sleep.

As I grow older, and I begin to watch my little sister learn the same lessons about friendship that I had to, I wonder if having friendships is really worth it. Maybe I could make it better by myself. Do I really want the pain that comes with being a friend?

Yet I've come to realize that I was created for fellowship. Everyone needs to be loved; we all need people we can depend on. In the same way, we also require someone to love, and we need to be depended upon. While there are - and always will be - times of pain in every relationship, there are also times of great happiness. And from the mixture of these two - great pain and great happiness - comes overwhelming joy. The joy of accepting and being accepted. The joy of being loved as you are, and of loving in return. The joy that comes from being a friend.