Never Unfriended by Lisa-Jo Baker & (in)courage

Author:Lisa-Jo Baker & (in)courage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Christian Life/Women's Issues
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

We’ve been coming to visit them a weekend here and there over the last four years since they moved to Pennsylvania and were back within driving distance from us. Christie and I walked out to the beds of compost that will become her flower garden and pulled up two chairs in her gardening shed with the wind blustering outside, the smell of manure in the air, and our kids hanging off a zip line. We sat in that imperfect setting and talked and talked and talked. I used to make lists before we would get together to make sure we didn’t miss catching up on anything. I’m always so hungry for conversation with someone who knows me and is interested in me beyond a witty tweet or Facebook update.

We talked for hours. The wind kept slamming the doors and windows on the gardening shed, kids hollered from a distance, and we kept right on talking. I hadn’t realized how much I had been needing to say, to process out loud, until someone was willing to listen without rush or deadlines. There were hurts I hadn’t stopped to pay attention to. There were holes in my faith that I needed someone to stand in alongside me. There were doubts I needed someone to acknowledge.

One of the ways our world of the fast and furious Internet hurts us is that so often our schedules and attention spans don’t have enough time to give each other uninterrupted hours of conversation. We will starve on a diet of conversations limited to 140 character tweets, text messages, or Facebook quips. We need soul food conversations. The kind that don’t cut you off because they have another meeting to run to. The kind that lingers.

That weekend Christie gave me what Dr. Leslie Parrott calls in her book Soul Friends the “extravagant gift of time and undivided attention.”3 It’s a love language that runs deep for me. I’m guessing, if you’re a woman, then it runs deep for you too.

We need to talk and talk and talk till we are all filled up from the gift of having someone else listen. Soul friends pay attention to what you’re saying, not to what time the clock says it is. Soul friends listen as long as it takes to make you feel heard. Soul friends aren’t in a hurry to get to the point or to check you off the list. Soul friends are more interested in the state of your heart than the state of your house.

It’s taken me years of these kinds of conversations for the truth to permeate my paranoia about my house or my hair or my life—true friends will always make time and space for each other. Period. It’s how our “Tuesday night girls” were born.

Every Tuesday night for years before our move I met up with a group of women. Sometimes in room 108 at church and every other week at Panera. We were suckers for the broccoli cheddar soup. Connie always wore the most beautiful jewelry.

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