Day 5: Friendship

Day 5:  Friendship

It’s midnight and the bunk bed springs are squealing as you hang over the edge to look down at your bunk mate.  You’re making faces and trying to make them giggle as your counselor admonishes you - once again - to settle down.  Your bunk mate is your best friend for life and the four days you’ve known each other has convinced that you should move with them to Ohio rather than going home at the end of the week.  You’re thick as thieves, making mischief at craft time, pretending to shoot each other in archery and being forced to retake the safety portion.  You squeeze into one little round seat at the cafeteria table because some knucklehead didn’t leave your spot open and you jostle your spots in line to make sure you get to take your swimming competency tests together.  You wear the matching friendship bracelets you made on day one and you won’t take them off until your mom declares it ratty and disgusting, and even then, it’ll go to your “important things” box.  Sixteen years later, you’ll be explaining to your four-year-old daughters what it is and telling them your adventure stories from summer camp.

Children know everything important about friendship.  When you’re young, you pick a person and you claim them.  They are yours and you are theirs and that’s just how it is.  Whether you like the same things is irrelevant.  Because you’re BEST FRIENDS; of course you’re going to like the same things.  As adults, we interview potential friends like job candidates - do they like what we like, are our values the same, do our vibes match…and then begin a slow and arduous process of forming a bond.  We’ve lost the ability to grab ahold of someone as a friend and then begin the delightful journey of discovering who they are.

Mission trips are apparently a bit like summer camp.  There’s an instant bond when you’re traveling abroad to a place you don’t know and you don’t speak the language.  You have a shared agenda and a shared purpose and there’s no question of whether these are your people.  These are your people!  It even shares some specific characteristics of camp - the buddy system, counting heads, waiting on the people who are perpetually running behind (that’s us).  😱

Rick, Lorielle, Katie, Renee, Colin, Emily, and Lupe are from St. Paul Lutheran and Shirley, John, Adriannah, Randy, Liz, Pastor Jim, and I are from St. John’s Lutheran.  There are tendrils of friendship crisscrossing between us, growing stronger with shared experience and caretaking and laughter.  Nightly euchre tournaments are fleshing out the skilled and the competitive, though this blogger can’t stay awake long enough to play.  As we work throughout the days, you see the small acts of friendship that are the mulch and fertilizer for growing strong bonds… “Can I fill your water bottle for you?  Let me help with that.  Can I repack those for you?  Do you need a break?  Have you had enough water?  Are you feeling okay?  How can I be helpful?”

Yes, these are my people.  Our lives may not cross paths on a daily basis once we return home, but through this shared experience, we belong to one another.  There’s a lesson here.  Maybe stop looking for the right people who might become your next couple of friends.  Maybe just grab ahold of the next person you bump into and determine you’ll be friends.  

I’ll end with a short story from detasseling corn as a 12-year-old.  I was not good at it.  And Lisa, in the next row, was annoyed with me.  But 3 hours and countless rows later, she walked me onto the bus and introduced me to Beth and Susan.  “This is Sam.  She’s part of our group now.”  And 36 years later, that’s still true.