And the circle widens...

Let's talk about friends. No, not the TV show; although, I could write a fairly long post about that, since I've seen every episode of the 10 season run many, many, many, many times. Many. But, that's for another day.

Today I want to talk about friends in my life. Both old and new.

I've never really had trouble making friends, or ever had a lack of quality friendships. Thankfully. Seriously...I have thanked God for this fact more than once. I have had the blessing of having some solid, quality friendships over my lifetime. Heck, I'm still friends with my very first friend, Joey. She's six months younger than me and we grew up on the same country road. That is one strong bond right there.

Some of the "Monson" girls at one of my bridal showers

Of course friends have come and gone as I have moved from my hometown, attended a couple of colleges, changed jobs, and switched churches over the past three decades. You can't keep every friendship you cultivate as you keep meeting more and more people. It would be emotionally exhausting. You really only need a handful of best friends. But I still have solid friendships from every single one of those areas of my life with one exception: my three years at UW-Eau Claire. It was a very dark time, friend-making wise. I walked away with only three semi-solid friendships from my time there and I rarely have any contact with any of them. I think I didn't make many friends during my last three years of college because there was no way I could top my experience at my first college. I had spent my first two years of college in a super-nova blast of friendship cultivating. I started school at a private Christian college (Go, Eagles!) and in the two years there, developed relationships with fellow Christ followers that are still in tact today! Boy, a common love for Jesus is like cement when creating a new friendship. It's some strong stuff.

Sarah, me, & Melody in my dorm room on my 19th birthday

Some of my favorite friendships are those where we may not be close now, but were great friends in the past. Then life changed, as it always does, and some distance (actual miles) were put in between us. And even though some time has passed since we had some face-to-face time, when we see one another, it's the most heart-warming thing. We pick up as though we just saw each other last week. That just happened to me recently. What IS that? How does that work? It happens to me time and time again. Man, I guess the bonds you make with a good friend can withstand just about any amount of time! Particularly when the foundation of your friendship is Christ.

My Eaglebrook Church singles Bible Study group doing our "jazz hands" pose

This mysterious phenomenon of reconnecting with old friends leads me to think of a couple of the girls I had as friends in elementary and Jr. High and then they moved away. I bet if I saw them tomorrow, we would chat as though there was no twenty-some-year gap between now and when we last saw each other as friends. That span of time would just evaporate into nothing as we talked and laughed together. In fact, that happened to me. I reconnected a couple of years ago with a friend that moved away in 1987. 1987! We are all grown up...our lives have taken different paths...we are different from who we were in 1987 (thankfully!). And yet...instant re-connection. What a miracle. Truly. A miracle! Oh, the bonds of girlfriends can be so STRONG!

With some friends from Reeve Church (the church I grew up in) at a Twins game

And then there are new friends. How this works truly amazes me. I got married five months ago. I have known my husband for less than two years. Which means that we were both thirty-somethings with well-established circles of friends. Working our two separate circles into one another's lives could prove to be a tricky thing. Will he like my friends? Will I like his? Well, I'm happy to report a big sigh of relief on this one. My husband is good at friendships. Really good at them. He's loyal, works at maintaining them, and is sort of the glue that keeps certain circles of his friends stickin' together. He has a lot of friends. This could have been a potential relationship land-mine. But no worries. As our relationship has grown, so has my circle of very new friends. He has some quality people in his life. As he says, "I stopped hanging out with jerks a long time ago." And it has brought me such delight to get to know these friends. I marvel at how some of these have become almost insta-friendships with very little effort! I am clicking with so many of them. I even told him my ranking of my favorites (which will be kept between the two of us). I am so excited to see where these new friendships take me and the role they will play in my life. It's such a blessing to meet someone, spend some time chatting, and feel like they are an old friend that I'm picking up with...instead of the reality of it...getting to know them from scratch. I sincerely do not take this for granted. It has not been this way for me in the past. I was in a relationship a long time ago and he had a tight-knit circle of friends. I had trouble connecting with many of them. In fact, there was ONE person that I felt it was easy to be around and I could be myself. One. The rest...I had a hard time relating to them...coming up with things to talk about...being myself as we spent time together. It all felt very forced. Not so with my husband's friends.

A gaggle of my husband's co-workers (current & former) at our reception

My former pastor used to say that friendships are sort of like an archery target. You have a lot of people in the outer ring. People who are acquaintances. Those you occasionally spend time with and enjoy being with. My outer ring has exploded since I've been married. It's bursting at the seams! What joy! The next ring are your close friends. The ones you invest time in on a fairly regular basis. He said most people have 8-10 friends in this ring of the target. This ring has grown for me as well and I would say it is far above 8-10. There are already 4 or 5 friends I have made through my husband's circle that I would place in this ring. It's easy to tell them things, to be a little vulnerable with them, to trust that mysterious connection. Then there's the inner-ring. Your "3 am friends." The people you could call in the middle of the night or in an emotional emergency...the friends you rely on the most. The ones you go to time and time again and say, "Pray for me." Supposedly you need only 2 or 3 people in this ring because any more than that and it becomes emotionally over-bearing. It takes time invested in these friends and your time can only be spread around so much. My inner ring is a little more crowded than 2 or 3. But that's okay because I can handle that.

On vacation in Canada with my husband's old friends and my new friends, Molly & Jay

Hey, old friends: "A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words." -Unknown

Hey, new friends: "Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."- Anais Nin