Denise
Here is some straight talk. You’ve been honest about your thoughts and feelings. You are hurting.
You don’t see yourself in the picture at all. You keep talking about the friend and her path and her circumstances and her journey and what is happening to her thoughts.
Here is how I see you.
You are to me, and for me, exactly like your friend is to you.
You are not seeing the value of worth and of beauty that God is working in, through and with you.
God Himself has given her, in and through you, His care, attention, consideration, empathy and love. She walked out and away and not without an anchor in you that is God. God is Love.
She had to go. She could do no more and no less than go. Now think for one second if you had been less than a friend to her. You are not less than a friend to her and so she has had the ability to leave and know you will still be there if and when she returns.
Think about it. Would the Prodigal son return home if he thought the Father had packed up and left also? No. He had the assurance that the Father was Home.
The Father of the Prodigal son, did not journey with his son but stayed at home and considered his son dead until he returned. Considering a person dead is not a gory or sinister thing of horror. The Father made it quite plain that he considered his son dead when he left home, because that son, would never be the same again. Likewise, and without grief, consider too that your friend, likewise, when she returns, she will not be the same person who left but will return wiser, better, and much more like the person any Heavenly Father of the Kingdom of God, desires, plans and purposes to have.
Be happy that you have not gone with her. The masterful work God is performing and preparing for her in the circumstances she is appointed to experience, shall not fail, neither you nor your friend or God. You can be happy for that!
Putting your friend in your future and stopping to look back puts you at that same window where the Father saw his son returning and ran out to meet him in great joy and celebration. Putting your friend in the future where she will be wiser and better off for the experience shared might help you over the grief of today.
She shall never be the same in a good way. God doesn’t fail. God is able to return your friend to you, perhaps not tomorrow or the next day, but whenever He has completed making her into a better friend who friend who shall not remain the same but improve under the skilled Spirit of Righteousness, guidance of Love and wise power of the Father that appoints to her, and you, and all, the circumstances over which non of us have any control.
She is in your heart.
God knows where to find her. Your prayers for her well being, her liberty from bondage and wisdom in the learning, could go well for her and you, as you stay joined to and with your friend, before the Father of Heaven, who gave her to you in the first place.
I have felt your suffering and I hope this message to you comforts, consoles and lifts your spirit into a golden healing knowledge that God forsakes no one. He is Love.
Arc