Honestly, Sandie

There is a gas-station receipt taped inside one of my old kitchen cabinets.

Not a cute little receipt from a road trip. Not one from a fancy dinner. Nothing anybody would ever save on purpose unless they were apparently me.

She had called and asked if I could pick her up, get her something to eat and a soda, then take her to the next stop on whatever version of the journey she was surviving that day.

So I did.

Then I went home and taped the receipt inside my cupboard.

Years later, we remodeled the kitchen. The cabinets came down. The counters and walls changed. The receipt was still there.

I saved it.

I met Moss Agate during my first year in Washington because I needed my hair done. Someone told me she was the best, she was fun, and she was easy to talk to. Which is how I ended up in her chair hearing stories about mission trips, terrifying mountain roads, and the kind of hope that makes somebody’s whole face light up when they talk about it.

The mountain-road part sounded like a personal nightmare. No seatbelt, a truck, a cliff, and apparently everybody agreeing to trust God a little harder than I was emotionally prepared for.

But she loved that kind of life. Not the danger part. The people part. The idea that you could go somewhere unfamiliar and show up for people who had nothing to offer you back. She loved the possibility of a life that was bigger than the tiny little box people try to keep themselves in.

We became coffee-shop friends.

The kind where you meet in the morning and look up at some point like, oh cool, dinner is now a situation. We could talk forever. About what we were doing, what we wished we were doing, what we had messed up, what we were trying to become. We had the kind of friendship where words mattered. Not because either of us had the answers, but because saying things out loud kept them from owning you in the dark.

Her life did not move in a straight line.

Neither did our friendship.

There were seasons when she called because she needed a ride, food, clean clothes, a toothbrush, or just somebody to sit near without asking her to perform being okay. I picked her up from places that made my stomach turn. I dropped her off at places I did not want her to go. I drove away hoping she would call again.

People love a clean comeback story. They want the moment where somebody says the exact right thing, everybody cries, the music swells, and the person walks into the sunset with a fresh start and a cute tote bag.

That was not this.

I could not pull her out of every hard place. I did not have the power to do that. I just wanted her to know there was still someone who saw her as more than the worst place she had landed.

She was never fake with me. That is one of the things I loved most about her. She did not hand me a cleaned-up version of herself and wait for applause. She could tell the truth about being scared and stuck and still somehow have hope sitting right there beside it.

That is not weakness.

That is grit.

Not quote-on-a-shirt grit. Not “rise and grind” grit. The real kind. The kind you build after life has knocked you down enough times that standing back up becomes a muscle.

Moss agate looks like little pieces of earth got caught inside a stone. It can be clear or milky white, with green threads and branching patterns running through it like moss or tiny forests. It formed from weathered volcanic rock, which feels a little on the nose for somebody whose life has had fire, wreckage, hard turns, and whole seasons that could have swallowed her up.

The green is not actually moss. Nothing alive is trapped inside it. Those lines come from minerals—iron, manganese, all these little pieces working their way into the stone while it formed.

That is why it fits her.

The hard parts are there. The lines are there. The dirt is there. None of it disappears just because the story keeps moving.

But when you look at her now, what you see is green.

Growth.

A whole damn landscape inside something that could have looked like a rough rock from far away.

I saw her in a parking lot recently and yelled her name across the lane like we were still twenty-something and late for something important. I stopped my car because apparently I have no parking-lot manners when I am excited. She came over and hugged me.

There she was.

Still funny. Still bright. Still that same person who could talk about hope like it was not a cute word people put on wall signs, but something you could actually carry around with you.

She has found her way back into church. I have not.

That has never made us awkward.

She does not need me to be where she is. I do not need her to be where I am. We have both had enough life happen to know friendship does not require matching blueprints. Sometimes you just see somebody in a parking lot and need to stop the car because you are so glad they are still here.

That old mission team we both loved carried a message of hope everywhere they went. I think that is what I was trying to hold onto when I taped that stupid little gas-station receipt inside my cabinet.

I did not need to save her.

I wanted her to know she was still worth hoping for.

Not everything is spiritual. A person needs food. A person needs a ride. A person needs somebody to answer the phone without making them earn it first.

Everything is human, though.

The ins and outs. The ups and downs. The long stretches where you cannot see the green yet. The weird little receipts you keep because something in you refuses to believe the story is over.

I am glad I found her in this world and in this life.

Her gemstone is Moss Agate because she has never been one flat color. She is all the layers. All the weather. All the hard-earned green pushing through places that should have stayed hard.

Song for this one: “Rolling Stones” by Lauren Daigle. Not because every lyric is our exact story, but because it carries that feeling of watching something you thought was buried start moving again.