Beloved Tahlia,

You are thirteen. Wow. It seems like yesterday you were just a wisp of a 10 year old  playing with dolls. And now you are this beautiful young lady, just beginning your teenage years.

The teens can be a magical time. They can also be difficult. Sometimes the difficulty leads to the magic.

About three years after your current age (so I would have been about sixteen), my mother died. When I was thirteen, I had no idea I had so little time left with my mother. Before she died, she wrote me a letter (similar to the one I’m writing you). In that letter, she gave me the only piece of advice that I have found to be true and helpful through my entire life. She told me that these were the three most important things in life: 1.) God (not an old white man sitting on a cloud but the Love that surrounds you, lives in you, connects you to all other beings)  2.) your health (because what good are you to anyone if you are not healthy?)    3.) your loved-ones (my mother was actually quite specific on this last point and she wrote “your friends are dearer than gold”). Remember this, dear Tahlia: YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEARER THAN GOLD. Through your life, you will experience heartbreak and betrayal and disappointment—sometimes the very friends you had counted on will be the ones to make you feel these things. But friendship is a great gift from God which, despite our human imperfection and inability to always treat each other as God would treat us, serves as a template of possibility for the human soul. In friendship we learn our first lessons about God’s infinite love for us. We learn about forgiveness, and trust and joy.

May you have the discernment, beloved Tahlia, to choose your friends wisely, the strength to cultivate and protect those friendships throughout your life. You will see that your friends will be your most prized possession one day.

Happy 13th birthday.

Love,

Auntie Ryan