Food is not only for personal consumption, but also for friendship.
Family members are knitted together based on blood relationship. And it is vital for a family to communicate and build up one another. Comparatively, friends get together voluntarily. Although friendship can be costly but inevitable for human beings. Apart from family members, we still need friends. As it is said, “One can depend on the family whilst at home, but we have to rely upon friends when we are away from home. “
Prior to the movement control due to the COVID19, my wife and me often went to different places to teach or facilitate seminars. We enjoy meeting friends of different places within our country. If it is another country, the different culture has broadened our knowledge and exposure.
In different places, we do meet long time friends. It’s a time to catch up and renew our friendship. If we meet new friends, usually we can smoothly get into a common topic. When we leave the place, we hope to visit again as there are friends or people we know.
A remote place in Lashio
A well developed place in Georgia
It doesn’t matter whether we are at a remote area or well developed city. It does matter whether we have friends at the place where we are.
Certainly we are not obligated to make friends everywhere, but we do cherish friendship. At any stage of life, even in a time of difficulty, true friends matter.
Recently, we have a friend on the other side of the South China Sea who was wounded quite badly by a fire accident. He has to be admitted to the Burn Unit of a hospital. It is inconvenient to contact and call him directly. And we can only get the update of his treatment and rehabilitation through the information regularly provided by his wife. Nevertheless, what we can do is to pray and send his family monetary love gift. I hope that apart from sending him private message, one day we are able to communicate by telephone or WhatsApp call. Perhaps one of the benefits of having social media is that when friends are not able to get together, we can still communicate with each other virtually. Of course, it is my hope to get together again to refresh one another. It is to be accompanied not only through having meals together, but also sincere conversation with one another.