Friendship - By Neely Held

I never thought 30 would still include friendship struggles. I never thought that the same feelings that plagued my awkward pre-teen years would exist in the parameters of adulthood. I was wrong. In fact, those feelings have just gotten larger and more hard because we learn more, suffer more, love bigger, and see more of life. 

In middle school and high school, I would look at adult women and think, “I can’t wait to get older, have it all together; and no longer struggle with rejection, competition, and loneliness.” I will say I probably didn’t think it so eloquently, it probably involved ugly tears, big meltdowns and lots of selfish views and outlooks. But nevertheless, the thought was there. That somehow it was the environment that made friendship hard, and while that didn’t help anything. I do believe that friendship is just hard because it involves people who apart from Christ are imperfect beings. 

(Pause for laughter at the thought that I thought adult women had it all together, as an adult woman now who does not in fact have it all together.) 

Those feelings just get bigger, right!? What a shock it was to my system that as adulthood came into the scene that the problems didn’t go away, but instead were kind of magnified by events like graduation, college, life highs and life lows, marriage and especially motherhood. I never dreamed that I would be married, a farm wife and raising 4 kids, one being a medically complex child and all of that would also bring its own weights and measures of difficulties in friendship. 

I have heard and fiercely fought the saying, “friendships come and go, some are for a lifetime and some are for a season.” Cute, right? But for my albeit extra personality the whole season thing is really hard on the heart. Anyone else? This idea that you can love people really well and they can still walk away? They can still reject you when you haven’t done anything wrong? 

People can leave. 

People can be cruel. 

People can make wrong decisions. 

People can make wrong assumptions. 

People can do all of those things. And when does it get better? It doesn’t. Encouraging blog post right? 

Here is the encouragement. Eventually, we all find our people. The people that don’t leave. The people that lead with kindness because they see your kids as their kids. The people that fight for you and your family. The people that think the best of you even at your hardest moments. Those  friendships that do last a lifetime. The few mom friends that become family and hang in there. They sit down in the car with you, and they look you in the eye, buckle up and remind you that they want to do community with you and your family.  

The women in your circle, big or small, who cheer the loudest and cry the deepest at ever celebration and devastation in your life. The women who show up and love hard, and believe that different seasons of life are not reasons to walk away, but reasons to pull in close that show us new ways to be present. 

These beautiful friendships are like a river, banging against the rocky banks and lapping against the current. Much like a river full of life giving water is friendship, good, ground breaking, no end meeting friendship is hard conversations, difficult truths, a lot of laughter and buckets, overflowing buckets of love. They are parts of the fabric that have made us into the wives, mothers, sisters, leaders and people that we are. We didn’t get here on our own? 

I didn’t know that the woman I am, here in my late 20’s and beginning 30’s would need and want the kind of friendship that cries besides hospital beds, picks up when depression hits so hard the pit is overwhelming, calls for the smallest details, and shows up in the biggest ways. 

Friendship gets overlooked a lot. It’s easy to miss how much we need others when we are focused on how much we can do for ourselves or what we need God to do for us. We miss out on community, and I’m not here talking about the big community, or the greater church body. 

I’m talking about the person that came to mind when you started reading this. I’m talking about the person or people that show up and give freely of time, of money, and of self. 

I have coined a phrase over my life, “it’s not hard to be a good friend.” I believe at the center of every Jesus loving woman should be a good friend because isn’t Jesus like that? Isn’t he the epitome of friendship and selflessness? 

I believe to become more Christ like, it is less casseroles and more in the pit moments of truth and beauty where  kindness and rugged grace dance beside each other heightening at the bridge of a song where we learn what Jesus meant it when He said, “He calls me friend.”

He beckons me to the cross with the title, “friend.” Wow. I lean against that cross and I breathe, to the beat of His heart, I breathe in the breath of the Savior who through example has taught us how to be a really good friend. 

Friendship, life doing, kid loving, family vacationing, and daily living friendship is the life way of the church because it’s what Jesus came to teach us. He taught us how to be a friend by being the greatest friend any of us could have. 

I truly believe that if we can hone in on the beauty of friendship we can be the best wife and mother to our family. We need those friendships that spur us on in this race of life and encourage us to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. 

A lot of people have made note that it’s not the birth date or the death date that matter, it’s the in between that makes all the difference, man, am I forever thankful for the friendship that fills the dash of my life. Jesus died to save us, and part of saving us is the beautiful thing of friendship. Friendship that makes me a better wife, mom and Believer. “What a friend, I have in Jesus…..” 

Well, what a friend, we are called to be.