Eleanor Roosevelt said: “Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.” Indeed, we encounter many, many people in the course of our lives, but relatively few become genuine “friends.” What is Creator’s perspective?

This is certainly focusing in on the greatest of human dilemmas. In many ways, there is no worse fate than being alone interminably. Loneliness is truly torment, and that is the consequence of being separated from other people. When everything within you is yearning for reconnection and a sharing of common interests, opportunities, and goals, and is the essence of who you are, a collaborative member of a community, it is a very deep part of your makeup. So Eleanor Roosevelt's description elegantly states a recognition that human to human contact can be both trivial and profound, and this is a fair assessment of what so much of life entails, a series of casual encounters, often with no recognition of the others present but simply ships passing in the night, so to speak, that will derive no satisfaction for anyone other than to keep the evidence going that humans still exist beyond the self, but that is small comfort if you reap no benefit personally. So the rarer gaining of a close friendship through an investment in time and energy, and most importantly an exchange of love in some form, will be the most fulfilling, the most inspiring, and the most empowering experience one can have as a physical human being. You are geared for this, you are designed for this from the outset, and in ideal circumstances, the greatest and truest friend you will ever have will be your spouse in order to share the full gamut of potential expressions of love, including physical intimacy. It is an irony of existence in the duality you suffer that even conjugal love can become trivial and only a surface representation of its potential to uplift and reward the person with bliss beyond imagining unless it has been experienced. Those friendships that involve an exchange of true kindness and affection quite separate from romantic love are nonetheless of deep significance because the soul extends far beyond the gender-associated hormonal imperatives giving rise to physical intimacy and its expression. What is happening with a genuine friendship is a meeting of souls when it goes deep enough to be open and honest, and truly representing a give and take, where each party listens to the other and there is a mutual pact to share something of great value in the give and take, so it is attuned through the act of friendship to look for opportunities to reward the other party by giving of the self, whether some new gained insight from personal experience or a recognition they have come upon something the other party will appreciate and go out of their way to explore it further and bring that awareness to the other person through an act of friendship and sharing. That mutual caring for and about one another might be mutually satisfying because of an alignment of interests but is nonetheless a kind of service and dedication allowing a person to express some of the highest aspects of character and divine alignment, especially in difficult circumstances where loyalty to a true friend is honored even at some personal risk. In a sense, you are substitutes for the divine for one another in its seeming absence because of the corruption within you to be so disconnected from the divine realm. So we see the deep and true friendship as a proxy for divine partnership and, in essence, constitutes divine partnership in as much as you are all part of the divine. So a reunion with an old and trusted friend is a reunion with us by extension and tremendously satisfying and rewarding for both parties, and us included, who are always present and surrounding you with our love.