Sometimes It's Not About You
Friends. We all have them. We have good friends and not so good friends. We have online “friends” and real-life friends.
Pastor Clay likes to say, “show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future.” See, we often think about and talk about how our friendships affect us, or the impact that our friendships have on our lives. We rarely, if ever, stop and think about the effect that our friendships might be having on other people. Why would we, right? Well today, that’s exactly what I want to talk about.
When I was younger, my parents always had close friends wherever we lived (we moved a lot). They would hang out with their friends regularly, so my sister and I were always at their friends houses or their friends and their kids were always at ours. My parents and their friends liked to play games, mostly cards. When we lived in Spartanburg, my parents and their friends always played Rook. I learned quite a few good curse words in those days while my parents played Rook with their friends.
Growing up seeing how important close friendships were to my parents taught me to value close friendships in my life. I saw how important it was for them to spend time with their close friends laughing and playing games. They made their friendships a priority. Some of my strongest memories as a child are of those times when my parents were hanging out with their friends. Those moments taught me to prioritize making time to spend with my close friends as an adult.
My parents’ friendships also taught me the importance of having friends that my husband and I spend time with together. Don’t get me wrong, we have our own individual friends that we love to hang out with, but we also have very close friendships with other couples that we make time to hang out with regularly together.
When we lived in Brunswick, my parents became close friends with another couple. Their daughter and I became great friends since our parents hung out together all the time. Our moms would go do things together, and our dads would go fishing on the river together all the time. They also spent a lot of time hanging out together. When my grandmother died, that was the couple that immediately stepped in and carried my parents through that horrible time. They came and picked me up the night that she died and took me to their house to stay for the night. They let us borrow their car to drive to Texas to bury her. They took care of our animals while we were gone. My mom and dad didn’t even have to ask; they just stepped in and took over.
That friendship that my parents had with this couple taught me the importance of having close friends as a couple and the importance of having friends that will just drop everything and take care of your needs without being asked. I learned what it looked like to have the kind of friendship described in Luke 5:17-26. Those friends were determined to take care of their friend no matter the cost, even if it got them a destruction of property mark on their permanent record. We all need to have friends like that. More importantly, we all need to be that friend for someone else.
The week before my wedding, my friend that was supposed to be my Maid of Honor lost her fiance unexpectedly in a car accident. I found out the night of my bachelorette party. I immediately called my boss and told her that I would not be at work until after my honeymoon because I had to go out of town. I dropped everything the week of my wedding and left town to be with my friend in the midst of the most tragic thing that she had ever had to go through. I split up all of the last minute details that had to be completed the week of the wedding among my bridesmaids and my now husband, and my mom and I hit the road. I did not return until the Thursday before my wedding, and I did not think about any of those last minute details once I left town. My friends’ mom sent me a thank you card a week or so later with a magnet in it that had Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 on it. I still have it on my refrigerator to this day.
My friend didn’t ask me to come and be with her during that time, and it never occurred to me not to go. It was like an instinct. As soon as I heard what happened, I knew that I had to go and be with her. If my parents had not had the friendships that they had when I was growing up, I don’t believe that I would have felt the way that I did or reacted the way that I did. I also don’t believe that my parents have any idea that the way that they modeled what friendships were supposed to look like as I was growing up had as much of an impact on me as it did.
The friendships that have affected my life the most are not any of the friendships that my parents had or any of the friendships that I have had thus far. The friendships that have had the biggest impact on me are the ones that my husband has.
My husband has two really close friends that he met when he was a teenager. The three of them have a bond like no other. They have been through all sorts of things together. They aggravate each other from time to time, but honestly who doesn’t? The three of them aren’t just friends anymore; they truly are family. They are each other's constants. They have something incredibly special and incredibly important to me. They have a godly friendship, and that is something that I had never seen before I met my husband and these two friends of his.
For our second date, my husband asked me to go try out this new church with him and one of those friends. He and I began to attend that church together afterwards and stayed there even after we were married for a little while. My time at that church and my time hanging out with him and these two friends really did mold my faith into what it is today. I learned so much from our conversations. I grew closer to God during our time at that church and during the times that I spent hanging out with him and those two friends. Mostly, I got to witness the powerful effect that having godly friendships has on a person's life. I got a front row seat to see how much your faith can be strengthened and how much your relationship with God can grow and flourish when you have these kinds of friends in your life.
These guys are not afraid to speak truth into each other's lives. They love each other relentlessly. They drop everything for each other when needed. They hold each other accountable and lift each other up. They catch each other when one of them falls. The funny thing is, I don’t think any of them realize just how incredibly lucky they are to have one another. And I know they don’t realize how big of an impact their friendship has had on me, my life, and my relationship with God. There are no words to describe how thankful I am to have been able to witness and learn from such a friendship as theirs. I pray that my friendships may have that kind of impact on someone someday. I pray that yours can too.