Scared to Friend

I'm learning a lot about myself lately. God seems to be breaking down walls and trying to heal wounds from a battle I'd forgotten I was fighting.

One of the wounds is friendship. Or maybe my ability to friend...I'm not sure if that's how to word this hurt. It feels like a ptsd of sorts. Even now, thinking about friendship has my chest all tight and my mind is racing but can't seem to land on a single thought, experience, or relationship.

Over last 17 years, friendships have take a lot of different shapes. sizes. depths. lengths. types. After high school, I didn't realize how much I'd relied on my have-always-just-been-there friends. I'd taken for grantied that I'd gone to school with so many of the same friends for yeeeeears, some since kindergarten. Jumping into college life, living on my own, marriage, many moves, and lots of kids each change how you interact with the world, how you meet and keep friends, what kind of friend you need and need to be, and I'm not sure I was ready for the dinamic changes.

Like tonight's crazy weather here in central Arkansas, drastic relational season changes blow in with little to no warning, hitting hard when there is seemingly no way in which to prepare. Moving puts distance between friends, and for someone like me who'd never learned to navigate a long-distance relationship it meant friendships were strained or severed. When my season of life looked different from someone else's, I wasn't sure how to mesh, mingle, and master the art of learning from one another. The world has told us that differing ideals, beliefs, political lines, and thoughts on world events means we shouldn't be Facebook friends much less hang out in person.

For years, I've fallen victim to 2 big lies about relationships: what they should look like and how long they must last.

Lie 1: True friendships will have the same educational choices, marital status, professions, parenting styles, location, hobbies. Spoiler alert, there are not and never will be two of us exactly alike. You don't have a clone you desperately need to track down in order to find "your person".

Lie 2: True friendships will last forever, it will be easy when you find it, and it will never get messy... Yeah, I couldn't even finish that sentence without sarcasm. Friendships are messy because they involve people. People are messy because we are a sinful people. Relationships require hard work if they're going to last but sometimes they were only meant for a season.

I'm currently trying to work on my relational skills, through my natural awkwardness and my raging fear of running people off after a couple years, yeah know- after they get to know the real me, things get all up in our grills, and it gets too hard.

There it is, did you see it. It finally came out. I'm scared to friends people. Satan uses my past to convenes me "they won't like me anyways", "if they really knew me...", "one of us might move soon", "it's not worth the effort to dig in deep and live all muddled together." Anyone else here have those ideas running through your mind?

My prayer is that saying these lies out-loud (or writing them down for my supportive friends and complete strangers on the web) will get them out into the open where God can heal what's been trapped in dark places so I can move forward with Him, not stuck in a holding pattern. Relational living is how we are meant to thrive; bringing Jesus to one another in our mess.