Fear and Friendship
I woke up this morning with a heavy heart. I spent all night with unsettling dreams that woke me before the sun and didn’t allow me to go back to sleep. After spending some time in the Bible I got up to start my day and go for a walk. The only thing that continued to be on my mind besides the fact that I wore a sweater outside and it seemed unbearably muggy for a September morning, was a prophetic word I received from my husband yesterday.
Yesterday was busy, so I gave myself permission not to dwell on the word and keep it in the back of my mind for later use. However, this morning, with my child at Grandma’s and my husband out of town and a whole morning all to myself I had absolutely no excuse to not take the time to ponder the prophetic word.
I’ve learned over the years to take prophetic words with a grain of salt and to test them. Sometimes someone is only getting it partially right and sometimes they are missing the mark altogether. It happens and I don’t mind. What I do mind, are the ones I immediately know are straight from the mouth of God because in my experience, when I get a prophetic word it means there is about to be a painful change in my life. It’s not that God is rebuking me or condemning me, but the words I get that I know are God breathed always come with a test, a trial, or a deep unsettling personal change.
My husband and I have been spending the week meditating on and praying about the increased responsibility in the Kingdom and our community that we are stepping into and how we wisely and safely jump into that. One thing my husband became convinced of after listening to a certain message this week is that we both need to have a steady and reliable support system. As our responsibility increases so will the opportunities for us to become frustrated and lose our peace, so we need accountability and friendship that will sustain us in that. When we walk into responsibility without that right back up team, we are destined to burn out before our fire can really get started.
My prayer for years has been to find a girl gang, some females friends to be connected with spiritually and emotionally. In 29 years of life I have yet to experience what I would consider a true, enduring friendship. My husband challenged me with this yesterday: that God had already provided those friendships for me, but I needed to be willing to pursue them and cultivate those relationships first.
I’m not a fool that thinks my lack of deep friendship is everyone else’s fault. I am very aware that the reason I am not close to anyone is of my own choosing. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point I made a decision that I was not worthy of friendship and that it wasn’t worth my time. It was an unnecessary distraction that kept me from work and personal time and nobody probably wanted to be my friend anyways. If anyone knew the true me, they would run.
I got back from my walk this morning after pondering some of these things to face a pile of dishes next to my sink. I had planned on going bra shopping this morning since my one and only “good bra” broke this week, but I also knew I had been putting off the dishes for too long. I decided to put a sermon on the TV and get to work. I could probably get them done in the time span of a quick sermon and still have time to go buy a new bra.
I asked God to show me the exact message I needed to hear and as I turned on YouTube I looked at the first message. It wasn’t from a speaker I knew, which sometimes makes me hesitant, but it was the top recommended video for me. It wasn’t even a topic I felt like I needed to hear about, but something inside me, beyond my flesh, told me this was the video to watch.
I turned it on, started making my way through the mountain of dishes, and within ten minutes was crying too hard to even see the sink anymore. I bent over ugly crying in the kitchen. The speaker was talking about how we can become so damaged in a certain area in our lives that while we may have miraculous faith in other areas, we cannot even allow ourselves to begin to have faith for the area we have been hurt in the most.
The revelation of God hit me hard. My area of deepest damage that I can no longer hold any hope or faith for, is that I will ever be worthy to have a friendship. I am so trampled and broken in this area that I cannot even begin to understand how to form a friendship.
For years I have told myself I don’t have time for friendships, I don’t have time get to know people. If I do get to know someone I usually don’t like them, or at least parts of them, anyways. I can’t relate. They don’t get me. They aren’t on my level. It’s just better to maintain a shallow relationship, one where I hold you at an arms length distance.
I cannot bear to be hurt again.
God told me last week my gift is my vulnerability, so I sit here on my porch this morning, sobbing as I type this and try to entertain my puppy at the same time. I’m not trying to be fancy or make this some kind of epic story, I am being raw, emotional, and vulnerable as I share this with you.
As I got up off the kitchen floor and paused the sermon I had been listening to I began the movie reel in my head of every friendship I ever had. My first friends were ones of convenience: my neighbors in the small borough I grew up in. One was very sweet and docile, but I remember the other being rather bossy and at times somewhat spiteful. I almost worshiped her though. I was afraid of upsetting her and afraid to do things without her, like go to preschool. She was my security blanket in a sense and even at the age of four she was able to control me through manipulation. That’s how young I was when this first set in.
In elementary school, my parents built a house in the country and I moved away. My friendship with those girls soon fizzled out as the convenience of close proximity no longer held us together. I made other friends, had other girls I hung out with, but I often found myself the butt of their jokes. I was tall, I wasn’t the most graceful or the most beautiful or the most funny and I was always somebody’s 2nd, 3rd or 4th pick.
In middle school I became closer with another group of girls, but they still picked on me. They called me “tubby” and I always seemed to be the one they tore down. I became hardened and pretended it didn’t bother me. I myself became a “mean girl”. I too learned to tear others down to lift myself up.
I made my first Christian friends when I began high school, but from the start I felt like I didn’t fit in and they didn’t get me. I still had a few friends from outside the youth group circle who I felt the ability to be a little more vulnerable with, but every time I shared my true thoughts or feelings I would be made fun of.
“You are stupid, you say the dumbest things. You are so embarrassing. Why would you think that? What a dumbass you are”
The kids I wanted to be friends with the most were the ones that rejected me, so I dropped out of high school in 9th grade and started doing school work online. I still maintained friendships with kids at the Christian camp I worked at. We went to concerts, youth group, hung out at bonfires. I was good at maintaining fun, shallow friendships. I was good at having boyfriends and connecting with boys. I understood even as a young teenager how to use my sexuality to get what I wanted. I could make myself wanted and I could use my charm to be popular in my circle and make other girls envy me. It was everything I thought I wanted.
I think that was the only time I ever had a true friend. This girl loved history and nerdy stuff as much as I did and we always got along. We had similar backgrounds and we understood each other, maybe a little too much. We both started down a road of depression and anxiety in our early teen years. I don’t know that our friendship made our mental health issues worse, but I don’t think it made it better. We too drifted apart in time as life took us in different directions and our interests changed.
In college I fell in with the “bad crowd”. They really weren’t bad kids in any way, they just weren’t the popular, study 24/7, former prom queen, prissy stuck up kids. I fit in with the kids that didn’t fit in, but still I found myself the brunt of their jokes, often being told I was stupid or not cool or too weird. I just felt like I wasn’t really good enough to be friends with them.
I made the healthy decision in my early twenties after college to cut ties with almost everyone from my former life. I reasoned that if people were not respecting or uplifting me, they did not need to be influencing my life. However, I made the extremely dangerous decision of never replacing those friends. In my mind I began believing the lie that friendship was dangerous and not beneficial to my well being.
Even after I met my husband Joel and I gained a new church family, I still held people at arms length. They were people I could call for a ride or help with an event, but not people I would call in a moment of spiritual and emotional distress.
I still can be friendly, I can have you over for dinner, I can sit and pray with you if you need me, but under no circumstances can I be vulnerable or share how I really feel, because then I may get hurt. You may call me stupid. You may call me dumb. You may be polite but not understand what I am trying to say, so it is better for me to be alone.
That is the dangerous place of isolation, the place where the enemy wants me. When I am isolated and cut off it doesn’t matter if I start walking in my calling. Like a seed planted in the shallow soil, without deep friendships to rely on I will soon wither and die. Without the support of deep roots to help me up when I am weak, I will perish.
Jesus didn’t call you into isolation. He didn’t call me into it either. Jesus put a calling over my life, but graciously He has been waiting to allow me to fully step in to it because he knows I am not fully supported yet. He knows I am still learning to be vulnerable with people and He knows I need to learn how to have friends.
So today, I am breaking off every lie the enemy has told me about my worth to others and my ability to have friends. I am not just breaking off those lies and walking away though, I am replacing it with the knowledge that I am worthy and I am not an island, I need others just as much as they need me.
And maybe above all,
I am not alone.
I can have friends.