I'm looking forward to seeing people at work again. Some have started in the past year and I've barely seen them, and some I've still never met. So I hope to make some new friends, and maybe go to lunch with them sometimes. I'm going to bring some snacks to work, because it's always nice to have a snack drawer. I may look for some new things to decorate my office with too. We're allowed an hour for lunch but myself and most others just work through lunch so that we can leave at a good time. But I want to go out to eat a little more, or to a coffee shop nearby during my lunch, either alone or with others. Or the park when it's nice weather, which is a very short amount of time here in GA. Of the year and 3 months I was in the office, I never went to the park nearby, and it's a nice park.
I've been at a new church for 4 months now, and it seems like both a long time and a short time. I am so thankful I found it in only 7 weeks, because in previous church searches I've looked for months up to a year. I miss my previous church sometimes and in some ways, but it's like when you leave high school and all of the people who made it high school leave, and only a few teachers or younger friends you liked were there, and over time they all leave too and what you miss are the people and how it used to be. There were a lot of new people that went to that church in 2020 that I just didn't get to know well enough to miss a whole lot when I left. I really like them, but I just didn't grow close to them. A few of my best friends are still there, but most have moved on too, or left before me.
In the middle of a transition still, I struggle to know who my friends are. I have a lot of surface level friends right now - some with big potential that I'm excited to get to know but have been too busy this summer to get together, and some that I see is having to move from my close friend circle to my "see you once a year" friend circle. And some just every 3 months or so. It's honestly painful. At the same time, I know that some people who don't go to church and only have work friends haven't been in contact with many friends at all over the past year, so I am thankful for the friendships I have and will have. A few weeks ago I went to dinner with a bunch of people from my new church, for the purpose of people getting to know each other or staying in community if they already knew each other, and there are three during the summer. All went really well, and at the end I ended up talking to a girl and we started having a really good conversation, and she was so kind and encouraging that I almost cried.
