Amy Hickman wrote an excellent post this week on the Aroma blog about hospitality and all the excuses we give for not doing it. She asked for comments, so I wrote one and included friendship in the list of things that people don't seem to have time for nowadays. This is near and dear to my heart, having moved away from all my friends and family nearly two years ago. I was very lonely for a long time and had to remind myself just HOW you make friends. I observed my children and watched how they make friends to try to remember how it works. You introduce yourself, you talk to them, you find out if you have things in common, you invite them for "playdates" and you evaluate how it goes to see if there might be something there. The problem arises when one person is interested in pursuing a friendship and the other person doesn't have time, or they have all the friends they think they need and no time for more. Make no mistake - it does take time to build a friendship. Shared experiences give you things to talk about and build intimacy. You almost have to have at least a few things in common in order to be friends. For instance, I find it easier to be friends with stay at home moms like myself because we can get together during school hours. It's nice to have friends with children similar in age to your own because hopefully they will get along together and form their own friendships. When it's right, you'll find that conversation flows freely and sometimes a half-hour passes while you're on the phone with your friend and you barely notice it. You seem to always have something to talk about, even if it's just asking the other person's opinion on Barack or Hillary (my opinion? Neither.). If you find yourself having to make a list of things to discuss with your friend, you might want to re-examine that friendship. :-)
Really, it's almost like a romance. You have to test each other out and find out if you can trust each other. "If I tell you this embarrassing thing about me, can I trust you not to tell someone else?" When that trust is betrayed it can be devastating. I'm glad to say that I haven't experienced that in a while. When we found LifeSong it was such a relief to get some friends. Up until then I really didn't have anyone I could invite over or go to the movies with. Some of the people I met when I first moved to SC I am still friendly with, but our friendship just never developed past a certain level. Now I have a nice-sized handful of friends that I feel I can trust with the real me and several others with whom I'm friendly but not at that level just yet. It takes a giant leap to expose yourself (figuratively speaking) to another person who is not legally bound to you (like your spouse) and open yourself up to rejection, which by the way was one of my biggest fears (from the sermon last week). I am terrified of extending the hand of friendship and having someone brush me off like, "I'm not interested" or "You're not important enough for me to waste my time on you". I often say you have to work pretty hard to hurt my feelings but that's not entirely true. That's really a defense mechanism. I figure if I say it enough times it will come true.
I sometimes get frustrated with people who complain about not having any friends around. They're usually sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. News flash: It doesn't work that way. You've got to be making some effort.
Anyway, back to the shared experiences. In the end that is truly what makes or breaks your friendship. You can have "phone" friends or "email" friends and be close but it's just not the same. You invent inside jokes that help you feel closer to each other, things that are funny because of your shared experiences and for reasons that only you know. I love having inside jokes with my friends! Most of them have the same strange sense of humor that I have so we really "get" each other that way. Just this morning, though, it occurred to me how that might make others feel. That's not the first time I thought of it, but the first time I let the thought settle in for a while. I've been on the outside before and it's not a good feeling. I wonder how many times I've made a joke that made someone else feel left out. If you're reading this and I've done it to you, then I apologize. I'm going to make it a point to try to pay attention to the feelings of the people around me who may not "get" it. It's too easy to use an inside joke to hurt someone or to exclude people and I don't want to do that.
Now back to the kids again. Have you ever noticed what happens when kids (like 9 and younger) do when they have a disagreement? They say what they feel - "that hurt!" "you kicked me!" and they get over it. The next day they don't remind each other of what happened the day before and they don't hold it over each other's heads. They don't normally hold grudges, at least not until they get to be teenagers, and that's a whole other animal. I'd like to be like that, with the childlike trust that what's done is done and not worth holding onto like some prized pet to be taken out and played with every so often. I think I sometimes hold myself back when I've been hurt, in an attempt to save myself from being hurt again, but I'd really rather go to the end of my life knowing that I loved people fully and gave grace when needed. How do I get there from here? Well, I don't know for sure. As I always say, "Self-awareness is the first step." Now that I know I do it and I've admitted it, I've got to do something about it.
By the way, that "self-awareness" thing extends to sin, too. Sometimes I don't want to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying to me because I know that if I do, I'll be responsible for what I do with that knowledge. Once you know more, more is required of you. That's how you grow as a Christian. When you're a "baby" Christian, you often do things that you don't realize are not right or are against God's will. As you grow more and learn more, your behavior (ideally) becomes more and more refined to be like Christ's. Maya Angelou said, "You did what you knew how to do, and when you knew better, you did better." She also said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." I think God is working on me somehow. I'm dealing with some turmoil in my heart/soul about how I treat people. It started out being about how *I* felt I was being treated and has been turned around on me so that I'm now examining my own behavior. I have no idea how this lesson will end, but meanwhile I'm going to put myself under a spiritual microscope and look for flaws in my approach to friendship. That doesn't mean that all my friends are now free to help me out though. ;-) I'm sure it's tempting.
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