What a Great Friend!

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First, I have a discussion on here titled, Truly the Greatest friend in the World!........I am so Lucky!!!! Please ignore that post, it is the same discussion as this one, except that one was a little to long and the last paragraph got cut off when I posted it. I have asked mylot to delete it for me so I could repost fresh, but don't know how long that will take or if they will or not. Now, on to what this discussion is really about. Have you ever heard the song, “You Find out Who Your Friends Are” by Tracy Lawrence? If you haven't you can find the lyrics here: http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/lawrence-tracy/find-out-who-your-friends-are-18288.html In any case, it's easy to see that this song describes what a true and great friend really is. Sadly, few people are fortunate enough to have this sort of friend. We (my family and I) are among this fortunate few. Yes, we have what we would consider to be truly the greatest and bestest friend in the world. I don't even know if I can put into words just how wonderful this person is. Just saying that he is the greatest friend anyone could ever have, doesn't even begin to cover it in my opinion. We have a lot of really good, and fun times with this person, but as the song says, it's when you find yourself in a bind which is the true test of which of your friends are true blue and which are not. On that note, let me give you a few examples: We are currently living in Illinois, our terrific and wonderful friend lives here too and has for many, many years. However we have not always lived here, there was a period of several years in which we constantly moved around from one state to another, for no reason other then we couldn't make up our minds where we wanted to settle down. Anyway, this one time we were living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We got into this bind there where we had no money, couldn't find employment and didn't know what we were going to do to get through until things picked up. Now here's where our great friend comes in at. My husband calls him up to ask for a loan. What my husband asked this friend for was if he could wire us $50 for food just so we would have something to eat while we tried to pull ourselves together and get an income coming in and get on our feet and all of that. What this friend actually did: he drove the little over 100 miles from where he lived to come see us in person. He bought us over $300 worth of groceries, paid our rent for that month and then, after all that, took us all out to eat before departing for his return trip back home! Need another example? How about this, We just recently moved back to Illinois last spring. Before we got into the current apartment that we now live in, we needed a place to stay while we saved for and searched for an apartment. This friend let myself, my husband and our two children stay at his house with him until we got a place. We stayed at his house for slightly over two months. Not once during that time did our friend ever show even the slightest hint of frustration or impatience towards our being there, even though I know it hard to be a bit of strain on him as he is used to a quiet home without a lot of ruckus or chaos going on, since it is normally just himself and his room mate who live there. Not only did he give us a place to stay until we got our own place but he did loads of extra things for us during the time we spent at his place that went beyond the call of friendship. One perfect example of this was when he decided that he was going to buy bicycles for each of our kids and refused to take no for an answer. Mind you he was already being very generous by letting us stay in his house, which is not a very large house by the way, no one expected him or asked or even hinted for him to go out and spend his hard earned money on any of us. He just decided to go out and buy bikes for our kids. Not second hand bikes either, but brand new shiny bicycles of their choosing, price no object!!! And in case you are wondering at this point, while he does live a reasonably comfortable life, no, his is not rich. Even after moving out of his house and into our own place, there have still been several times when we have needed assistance and have ended up turning to this same friend for help. Each and every one of those times he has readily stepped up to plate to help us, never once hesitating even for a second or asking what he would get out of it. We don't have a car right now and there are numerous times that we have relied on him for rides to one place or another. We have offered him gas money many of these times, he has always provided the ride, but absolutely refused the gas money. There have been at least a half dozen times when for one reason or another we have found ourselves a bit short on cash in any given week and could not afford the laundromat where we must do our laundry. In each of those cases we have once again called upon this great friend who graciously let us infringe upon his time to once again invade his quiet home for three or four hours while we ran up his water and electric bill to use his washer and dryer to do our weeks worth of laundry. Just as recently as last weekend, my husband and I made a stupid mistake which ended up costing us $250. This fee was automatically charged to our debit card which in turn over drafted our bank account by slightly over $300. ($300 due the fact that the unexpected $250 fine cleared before a couple of other things did, causing there to be more then one overdraft, plus the overdraft fees that the bank charged). Our bank account is back on the positive side now, but by less then $50, the rest of the money we got for the week went to cover the negative balance. Anyway, because of that we once again could not afford the laundromat and thought ourselves lucky to have enough money just to get a few staple groceries to get us through the week. So today, we once again called upon our truly awesome friend to ask if we could do our laundry at his house, and also to ask for a ride to Aldi's (the cheap grocery store) which was the only place we could afford for groceries for the week. This friend was already aware of our financial screw up from the previous weekend. Anyway, we could not do laundry at his house today because his room mate had invited one of his friends over to come do her laundry and therefore his washer and dryer was not available for use. Our friend could have just left the laundry issue at that and said no to the laundry period. After all, our laundry is not his responsibility. Of course our friend did not just say no to our laundry problem though. Instead he took me to the laundromat, where he paid for me to do the laundry! Heck, he even helped me fold some of it, even though I never asked. After the laundry was done he gave me that ride to the grocery store. Along the way he explained how the ride to the grocery store was no problem at all since he needed to pick up a few groceries himself anyway. When we got to the store, he pretty much went his way while I went mine in the store. Given that I didn't have much money, I bought a pathetic few groceries. Just enough to get us through the week. A short while later the grocery shopping was done and I was back in the friend's truck and headed for home. Once we got back to my house, this wonderful friend that I have been telling you about got out of his truck and began to help me carry my laundry and groceries in. He carried most of the stuff in, he had grabbed most of the bags and things out of the truck and headed into my apartment with them before I had even made it around to the back of his truck. He carried the bags of groceries that I had bought into my apartment. He also carried in the bags of groceries that he had bought! All the bags of groceries that he had bought!....All during the time we had been in the grocery store together, I thought he was buying groceries for himself, when in reality, he was buying them for us!!!...It wasn't a huge amount of groceries this time, nothing like that time in Iowa, but still, once again, it was above and beyond what we had asked for or expected and something that he certainly did not have to do, yet he did. So anyway, that is a little about our wonderful, terrific truly great and totally awesome friend! He is truly one in a million and we consider ourselves blessed and incredibly fortunate to have a friend like him. We only hope that we can even begin to repay him for all he has done for us someday. Do you have a truly great, fantastic friend? If so, do you realize how fortunate you are to have this kind of friend? Do you appreciate him/her or take him/her for granted?