Good friendships are hard to come by.
In my 20s, I heard the quote from Lee Iacocca: ”When you die, if you’ve got five real friends, then you’ve had a great life.”
How lucky I am, I thought. I have so many more than five.
Now in my 40s, I understand.
Because if I had a win to celebrate or a burden to carry, I’m not sure I could compile a list that long.
So I have to say right here, if you are reading this and thinking, “I thought we were friends?” You are correct.
I have a long list of good acquaintances who care about me, my family, my joy, and my sorrow.
But I’m talking about friendship: real, genuine, share-a-pint-of-ice-cream, cry-on-your-shoulder friendship.
So let’s break this down.
What’s the deal with adult friendships?
Several years ago, before grocery pick-up and delivery were a thing, I came home from an arduous afternoon of grocery shopping with five kids.
The house was already pretty messy. I’m sure it was the standard: Dishes, laundry, kid stuff, and floors sprinkled with dirt and spotted with yesterday’s popsicle drippings. My husband was at football practice, and I had been wrangling the kids all day. The overwhelm of fixing it up, along with a mound of grocery bags piled on the table, the counter, the bookshelves, and the speckled floor, was too much.
(Pro tip: unlimited summertime popsicles are a must, but teach those kids to eat them outside!)
But even when you are tired, groceries can’t sit for long, so I began to unbag them. When I got to the popsicles (yes, more popsicles), a thought occurred to me. I picked up the phone and asked a friend if she would like to bring her kids over and share popsicles with mine.
I put away everything that would melt or spoil, and she was at my home within minutes.
Floor spotted. Sink full. Groceries everywhere.
While the kids played, we sat on my couch, in my imperfect home, and talked for a couple of hours.
The disorder didn’t matter to her. She came and sat with me in my mess.
Friendship is forged in the mess.
It’s a hundred ordinary and chaotic moments where you have the grace to reveal hard truths and be seen as you are.
It’s understanding that popsicles are refreshing at the cost of being sticky. But what makes them messy also makes them good.
So let’s be real.
Early in adulthood, friendships are defined by late-night Taco Bell runs and spilling the tea on your latest love interest. Chase that up with engagements, bridal parties, double dating, and lots of time spent with other families in the same stage of life as you.
When you’re sitting across from a fellow mom in the nursery, feeding babies and smelling like spit-up while toddlers run half-naked nearby, relationships come a lot more easily.
But in midlife, we are pre-menopausal and post-heartache — the kind that leaves quiet scars we’d rather keep hidden.
We carry heavy personal burdens and too often choose to hold them alone rather than inviting someone into the mess with us.
And that’s where friendship can begin to crumble.
What do we do about that?
Let them in.
Romans 12 begins with a call to present yourself as a living sacrifice, followed by several verses that teach us what that means.
Among those instructions, we read this: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” (Romans 12:15)
And if we are honest, we invite people into a lot of rejoicing, but when weeping comes calling, we slam the door.
Because I don’t want people to know the thing that nearly shattered our family.
I don’t want to relive the pain.
I don’t want to wonder whether you’ll believe me or judge me.
I don’t want to seem needy, and I don’t want to be a burden.
I don’t want you to know that my life is complicated, broken, scarred.
I don’t want to risk you walking away from me because of it.
But life isn’t meant to be lived without deep, meaningful friendship. So friends, I’m inviting you into my mess — figuratively and literally (because my floors are still spotted).
I ask you to rejoice and weep with me, and I’ll do the same for you.
Maybe friendship is still a little messy, but maybe that’s what makes it good.
A Cup That Runs Over 