I do have a stylist who helps me shop, because I don't have time to shop.

May this be the year that things go your way most of the time, and when they don't, may you have great friends to lean on.

Who you spend time with is who you become.

You become like the people you spend the most time with.

Let us seek friends that will stir up our prayers, our Bible reading, our use of time, and our salvation.

But it's the same with all my friends, just fun and joking, nothing more. I can never bring myself to talk of anything outside the common round.

All I think about when I'm with friends is having a good time. I can't bring myself to talk about anything but ordinary everyday things. We don't seem to be able to get any closer, and that's the problem. Maybe it's my fault that we don't confide in each other. In any case, that's just how things are, and unfortunately they're not liable to change.

But there's the catch. I'd like to live that seemingly carefree and happy life for an evening, a few days, a week. At the end of that week I'd be exhausted, and would be grateful to the first person to talk to me about something meaningful. I want friends, not admirers. People who respect me for my character and my deeds, not my flattering smile. The circle around me would be much smaller, but what does that matter, as long as they're sincere?

Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.

One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people.

But when someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again.

It may strike you as a small miracle that you have someone in your life, whose taste you admire, who will tell you the truth and help you stay on the straight and narrow, or find your way back to it if you are lost.