Messy Friendships
It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.
– C.S. Lewis
We in our self-sustained, well-resourced, individualistic lives prefer neat friendships. In a neat friendship, you schedule your meets-ups at least two weeks in advance, for a designated duration of time. You inconvenience each other’s schedules as little as possible. You rarely ask to borrow anything, and only if they’ve asked you too in the past. You respond to concise, mutual updates with positive, encouraging feedback. You stick to topics and interests you both agree on. You don’t ask too many direct questions. You avoid uncomfortable confrontation. You ghost if things get too complicated or difficult.
Neat friendships are convenient. They allow us to sustain relationships while avoiding the needier or bumpier aspects of relating that can so easily disrupt our personal ambitions or priorities. It’s easy to make them our default when we live with the demands of school, training, career, marriage, or kids. It’s easy to become used to finding what we need, and coping with our problems, largely on our own. This is not to say that it’s not alright and even necessary to have boundaries in our relationships, to adjust expectations during various stages of life, or to be careful about how we use our time and energy.
But lately I’ve been asking: what should friendship be? Our closest friends should be people we can call at random moments and during difficult times. They should be willing to challenge us when we’re wrong, or offer a different perspective on a topic we have a strong opinion about. They can point out blind spots we may have in our marriage and parenting, in how we live our lives or work our jobs. They should share our joys and victories and be privy to our shames and struggles. They remain present through dark times.
Friendship like that is messy. It means being willing to bother someone and be bothered, to ask for help and receive it. It means discoursing on touchy or even painful subjects. It means being open to being challenged or feeling uncomfortable, to disagreements and arguments, to working through hurt, to offering apologies and forgiveness both. It means not having a time limit. It may mean finding ways to communicate long distance or being willing to travel to spend time together.
There’s a kind of myth out there that friendships should be easy; that if you have to work at them too hard, maybe that person isn’t the right friend for you. There’s a place for discretion in all our relationships. But the older I get, the more I feel that being a friend is just as much about commitment as having common interests and values. And like any close or important relationship, part of that commitment is the willingness to work at it, to enter into the mess—not only because we all need a good friend, but because we all need to learn to be a good friend. We need to learn how to be the kind of friend that we want. We need to learn to listen, to forgive, to persevere, to be patient, to give generously, to be vulnerable. We need to learn how to lay ourselves down: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
I am naturally quite terrible at this. I am self-sufficient to a fault, lapse into judgment too easily, tend to value efficiency too highly and relationships too casually. So this is something I’m learning, sometimes (it feels) one painful step at a time. I’m learning how to be more intentional about my friendships, to ask, how important is this friendship to me? I’m learning how to clear out space in my life for the inevitably unexpected time and emotional energy messy friendships involve. I’m learning how to expect conflict and be willing to work through it. I’m learning to ask, what is God showing me that I need to work on? It’s not an entirely pleasant process, but even within it I am aware of God’s grace, both in showing me these things about myself, and in the steadfastness of friends who stay with me through it all.
