Messy Beautiful Friendship

Finding and Nurturing Deep and Lasting Relationships

Christine Hoover

• Publisher: Baker Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780801019371
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493406449
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Women long for deep and lasting friendships but often find them challenging to make. The private angst they feel regarding friendship often translates into their own insecurity and isolation. Christine Hoover offers women a fresh, biblical vision for friendship that allows for the messiness of our lives and the realities of our schedules. She shows women

- what's holding them back from developing satisfying friendships
- how to make and deepen friendships
- how to overcome insecurity, self-imposed isolation, and past hurts
- how to embrace the people God has already placed in their lives as potential friends
- and how to revel in the beauty and joy of everyday friendship

With stories of real friendships and guidance drawn from Scripture, Hoover encourages women to intentionally and purposefully invest in one of the most rewarding relationships God has given us.

Part One
A New Vision for Friendship

One
When Did Friendship Become Such a Struggle?

It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer1

When we were children, friendship merely happened to us. Friends came as easily as the sunrise and as effortlessly as the line on the doorframe by which we measured ourselves inched taller every year.

We didn’t have to think about making friends. We simply approached the monkey bars on the playground, signed up for an after-school team, or steered our bikes onto the neighborhood sidewalks, and, within seconds, we were swept up in a swarm of similarly aged kids barreling toward the ice cream truck blaring circus music on loop. We were racing alongside our teammates to the concession stand for after-game snow cones or migrating together through the neighborhood in gangs of three-wheelers, scooters, and Schwinns.

Our mothers, when probing for the day’s details, referred to this random assortment of kids as our “friends.” And we supposed they actually were, because they generally liked what we liked, lived where we lived, and did what we did. They were in our proximity, moving in the same kid orbit; therefore, they were our friends.

My grade-school best friend lived around the corner from me in a house that smelled of stale cigarettes. On sticky summer days, we’d lie on our stomachs on her brown-and-white speckled shag carpet, chins propped on our fists and feet thrust in the air, watching people get slimed on Nickelodeon, a channel I didn’t get at home. She had a white canopy bed with high posters, which we’d use as microphones to belt out Whitney Houston songs as we jumped around on her bedspread. Famished from these rock star demands, we’d run to the kitchen for Oatmeal Creme Pies, and afterward she’d teach me ballet positions using the oven handle as our barre.

We had little in common, aside from being in the same class at school and living on the same street, and our childlike friendship required little to no work on my part, aside from the bike-pedaling or roller-skating it took to make my way over to her house. Few responsibilities limited our time together, few insecurities existed between us despite our differences, and little thought was given to where we stood with each other.

We just were.

High School and College Friendships

My family and I moved away from that street and that city entirely the summer between elementary school and middle school, that period of time that is the exact intersection of growing social awareness and self-conscious awkwardness. I cried my eyes out to my mom my entire sixth-grade year because I was the perpetual new kid, I didn’t like being the new kid, and, most painfully of all, I was struggling to make new friends. It was the first time I’d ever felt out of place and, being brutally shy, I was suddenly faced with the realization that I’d actually have to try in order to have friends. Merely joining a softball team or the youth group at our new church wasn’t going to cut it; I’d probably have to speak to people as well.

Finally, after about a year, I fell into a group of girls who were part of my youth group—Jo, Sara, Cindy, Ashley, and eventually Anne. It was Jo, however, who became my closest friend.

Jo knew when I liked a boy and I knew when she liked a boy, and, blessedly, we never liked the same ones. In middle and high school, not liking the same boys is absolutely the key to an enduring friendship, and so ours lasted. Together, we laid out in the summers, exercised to Jane Fonda aerobic videos, marched in the high school band, and slumber-partied at each other’s houses, where we’d fall asleep listening to tapes of the New Kids On The Block.

Our friendship was comfortable, easy, and a warm, reassuring blanket during our high school years. Knowing I always had Jo, no matter what, gave me a sort of confidence that exceeded my average teenage insecurities.

Then came college. She chose one and I chose another, and we made plans as to how we’d stay connected. Our Sunday school teacher, with good intentions I’m sure, tried to prepare us for an evolving friendship, predicting that we probably wouldn’t remain best friends. With that gauntlet thrown down, we entrenched ourselves even further in our dedication to call and write each week. Our mutual friend Nancy, who sat behind me in calculus class and constantly sprayed breath freshener into her mouth, informed me of something that might make communication easier—this thing called email.

“Oh no,” I said snidely, “I’m sure that’s not something I’ll ever use.”

Shockingly, we did use email. And the phone. And the answering machine. And old-fashioned letters. But mostly email, just as fresh-breathed Nancy said we would.

We weren’t in close proximity anymore and our friendship required more work than it ever had, but I’d learned that friendship isn’t always guaranteed, making friends takes effort, time together helps, being in each other’s homes solidifies friendship, and I would have to let a friendship evolve in order for it to survive.

College is where I delved deeper into the distinctive joy and richness of Christian friendship. My freshman year I joined a Christian sorority made up of three hundred girls who “held me accountable” and asked me about “my walk” and wanted to “do life” with me. And did I mention that we had a counterpart Christian fraternity? I met my husband through that fraternity, and we were elected presidents of our respective groups at the same time. I’m not joking. We each had red presidential phones, hotlines that allowed us to call each other with Christian emergencies. OK, I’m joking about that one.

Christian community in college, I discovered, required a new kind of vulnerability. In high school, vulnerability was revealing the name of the boy you had a crush on. In college, however, there was the whole aforementioned accountability thing. People wanted to know stuff so they could pray for you. You listened to their stuff so you could pray for them. This was Christian friendship in college, cemented by intense time together, proximity, and lots and lots of fun. I found it incredibly fun to live with and among my friends and to stay up past midnight talking and laughing and even praying together. I enjoyed having a full social calendar and meeting hundreds of new and interesting people. (And, Mom and Dad, I also had a full academic calendar of studying, going to the library, getting eight hours of sleep each night, reading every assigned reading, and going to class. Yep, so, so full. PS: thanks for college. I learned a ton that I continue to use to this day.)

And Then We Became Adults

Looking back, college was the friendship jackpot. I remember that time with fondness, and I admit that I’ve spent much of my adulthood dreaming up ways to re-create that slice of life. College friendships felt much like my childhood friendships, when community just sort of happened to me, except in college it was with additional freedom, opportunities, and diversity in the types of friends I made. Everyone was on an equal playing field because everyone started as a new student and everyone was asking the same questions about life and the future and relationships.

But then we all became adults. Suddenly, we weren’t on an equal playing field any longer, because some of us became engineers and some of us chose to get a graduate degree in psychology (ahem). Some of the kids I went to high school with had skipped college altogether, entering the workforce straight out of high school and having to grow up a little quicker. Some of us got married right away and some of us didn’t. Some of us were already picking out fabric swatches for the curtains and couches in our newly purchased house while the rest of us went back to Mom and Dad’s spare bedroom.

I moved into an apartment with Jo, who’d also graduated that May, and before we had even finished arranging the living room furniture she was blissfully and ecstatically engaged to the boy she’d giggled about through the computer back in college. Our boxes weren’t even unpacked and she was already announcing that she’d be moving out in mere months. I was feeling less than blissful and ecstatic, because it felt like he was becoming her best friend and little single ol’ me was being left in the dust.

I didn’t like that my friendships were evolving, nor did I find this new social territory exciting. Life coaxed me toward making new friends, but I didn’t want to make new friends; I simply wanted to figure out how to maintain the ones I already had. I wanted things to be how they used to be.

Effortless.

Carefree.

Fun.

In reality, I had crossed over some invisible line. I was no longer a child, and friendship had become inexplicably and frustratingly hard. The ease of childhood friendship was forever irretrievable.

Becoming an adult did a number on our friendships, did it not? At least that’s what I’ve observed in my own life and what I’ve heard from other women along the way. Transitioning into life as an adult tilted our equilibrium in a way that took us years to recover from, if we’ve ever recovered at all. Finding and learning a new job, finding and learning a new city, finding and learning a new church, figuring out the whole singleness thing or the marriage-and-kids thing—all of these have demanded our best efforts and prime energy. Friendship? We’ve had to coast a little bit on what we built long ago, and, over time, all that coasting has ended in loneliness or attempts at re-creating youthful friendships or painful heartache and anguish. The ease and the confidence we’d grown up with regarding our ability to make and deepen friendships quietly eroded. The time we’d always enjoyed to make and deepen friendships evaporated into work and diapers.

Somehow, friendship became a struggle.

And I didn’t have the foggiest clue how to cultivate adult friendships. They seemed a different creature altogether, and they definitely would require work and effort—I could tell that the second I crossed the invisible line into adulthood—but just how was I going to do this? How did one make new friends and spend time with old ones while also juggling so many responsibilities and obligations?

Inching along in traffic every day as I commuted to my first post-college job, I thought about the adult friendships I’d observed growing up, searching for clues. Honestly, there weren’t many friendships I could recall, and that should have been my first clue.

But there was one.

When I was a child, my parents constantly lugged my sister and me across town to Kay and Kenny’s house. There, we played with their son, ate simple meals, and ran wildly through the mishmash of yards in their home’s vicinity while our parents talked or played cards. I don’t remember not knowing Kay and Kenny. They’d been my parents’ friends since before my birth.

When my family moved across Texas that summer before I started middle school, Kay and Kenny actually moved with us. When Kay and Kenny built a house on a cul-de-sac, we built a house right across the street. When their son got his driver’s license, he became my ride to and from school each day. Even when the three of us kids were teenagers and all going our separate directions, we still occasionally had hamburgers on Kay and Kenny’s back porch and we still went to the lake together each summer.

Even then—the summer after college, which I spent sitting in Dallas traffic—when I’d go home to visit, soon after I pulled into the driveway, Kay and Kenny would come across the street with a meal or an invitation for dessert on their back porch, as if their own child had come home.

Their friendship with my parents had taken purposefulness: they’d made decisions that stoked the friendship and kept it alive. These decisions weren’t necessarily as big as the one to move to the same city at the same time, although that certainly helped, but rather smaller ones: to pop into each other’s homes for a few minutes of conversation, to serve at church together, to champion each other’s children.

Their friendship had also taken perseverance: they didn’t quit on each other, despite being fairly different and despite their children being fairly different. And it had taken time. Their friendship had been built over many years, not a few months. Like with a good wine, time had aged the friendship well.

As a fledgling grown-up, searching for clues about adult friendship, I knew instinctively that this kind of friendship was rare, and, thinking about it for the first time, I treasured that my parents had cultivated such a thing and that, simply by proximity and osmosis, I’d had it too. I’d had the picnics on the back deck thrown together at the last minute and the spontaneous decisions to go out to eat, all of us piling intermixed into cars. We just walked into their house and they just walked into ours, bringing or borrowing whatever was needed. And if we were lucky, the meal ended with Kenny’s famous homemade ice cream, the kind that is half-melted from the start and requires a second or third helping.

On the back door of the house where Kay and Kenny lived when I was young hung a sign that read, “Back-door friends are best.”

That’s what I hoped for myself: back-door friends, women who felt comfortable waltzing in my door without knocking, who grabbed what they needed from my fridge without asking permission, who knew that there was a seat at the table and love in my heart for them, and who knew that the meal just might end with homemade ice cream.

And so, with those clues and hopes and ideals in my head, I set out to get that kind of adult friendship.

Two
The Dreams We Have for Friendship

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer1

Yesterday I heard a classic Journey song on the radio, the one about bright lights, life on the road, and intense pining for a love waiting at home. (“I’m forever yours, faithfully.”2)

In high school, when Jo and I traveled with the marching band to away football games, I listened to that song over and over again on my Walkman, dreaming of the time when I’d finally have a love to call my own. I suppose I thought at the time that I was living a hard life on the road, traveling to play my flute because our football team needed rallying, and that, somewhere, someone was faithfully waiting for me to high-step into the stadium of his heart.

When I heard the song yesterday, I was driving my mom car to pick up my kids at school for the bazillionth day in a row. I’d spe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: A New Vision for Friendship
• Part Two: Threats to Friendship
• Part Three: Discovering and Deepening Friendship
• Part Four: Being a Friend
• Part Five: Receiving Friendship
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Questions for Friends to Discuss Together
• Lessons on Friendship
• Wisdom from the Bible on Friendship
• Notes
• About the Author
• Back Ads
• Back Cover