Friends have been defined as people who know you at your worst and like you anyway, people in whose company you can be yourself. But perhaps more than anything else, friends are people who care about you for who you are, not what you can do for them. There is a kind of holiness in true friendship, because it makes sure that we are never alone when we desperately need to not be alone.
I invented what I call the Invisible Art and Light technique. In normal light the painting appears one way, and when you turn on the black lamp, the beams of light emerge. It is also a brilliant metaphor. If we look with our physical eyes we see only the surface of the message. But when we look with our spiritual eyes we see so much more. We see the light that is given as a gift from Heaven. And isn't it interesting that a black light is used to see the whole picture? In the same way we must go into our own darkness, the things we hide because we are ashamed, in order to unleash the light within. It is only when we give our whole selves to God--the positive and the negative--that we are enlightened.