Best friends

WARNING: if you suffer from worrying or have a natural disposition for feeling guilty, do not read on. :-)

Who can remember being a kid? Not necessarily a little kid, maybe a teenager at high school or even at college or university. Do you remember the process of making friends? Do you remember choosing your best friend or, perhaps even more importantly, being chosen by someone else as their best friend? Do you remember what it was like when others were best friends and you weren’t? They hung out more together, they knew more about each other’s lives, they helped each other out.

Can you imagine wanting a best friend so bad, waiting and wanting to be chosen by someone as their best friend, but it never happening? Not ‘cos of anything you did (or didn’t do), not because you didn’t want it enough, not because there weren’t enough people around, but because of the situation, the timing, the location. Maybe you’d feel rejected. Maybe you’d feel like you don’t belong. Maybe you’d feel like you’re always on the outside. Maybe you’d feel like you’re missing intimacy in your relationships. Maybe you do right now.

That, a lot of the time, is what it feels like to be a missionary.

We love knowing you, caring for you, loving you. We just wish we could know you, care for you, love you MORE. We wish we could be your best friend. We wish… you could be our best friend.

No matter how many people we know, or how long we’ve known them, the constant change in our lives (our location, others location, our roles, others roles…) means it’s extremely difficult to ever get to know (and keep on knowing!) anyone that much. To feel, really FEEL, like best friends.

Depth in relationships, truly knowing someone and being known by them, comes with joint experiences. Joint experiences come from time. There is no shortcut. We know the grass can look scarily attractively green ‘on the other side’, and that ‘just being’ with someone (or some people) does not automatically mean you will become best friends. There can be a whole lot of loneliness amongst a big old crowd! However time and joint experiences are A factor needed for deeper relationships and that just isn’t something we have a lot of at the moment.

This is the biggest challenge of our daily lives.

We don’t want you to feel guilty, or even pity for us. This is the life we have chosen and feel called to at the moment. We just want you to know how our life can feel. Maybe it’ll even help you understand why we act the way we do sometimes! It isn’t easy to write about these things, and we know it isn’t easy to read about them either. Thanks for reading and for caring.