Out of Town Friends

So having hit the married, thirty-something mark, it's been really interesting to revisit the whole, "making friends" topic. I believe that at different stages of life, a person will make friends in different ways. For instance, when you are in grade school it's all about who you hang with at recess. When you get into high school a lot of times it's who you are in a band, choir, sport, etc. with. College seems to be about your dorm or floor or suite mates. For me, the military experience led to some pretty given connections. You ate, worked and lived with the people you got to know there.

Having now moved into the married realm, it's a whole new set of rules getting to know new friends. For one, the shift with existing friendships is really crazy. I don't how it is for you girls out there, but a lot of us guys spend our single adult life being drop of the hat people. What I mean by this is that I rarely planned more than twenty-four hours in advance socially. So usually, with other single friends, we would decide the day of to hang out and it was normally left pretty open ended. There were rarely starting or ending times determined. This was life. Pretty frequently, the same group of people would end up hanging out, naturally giving you the opportunity to get to know each other pretty well.

In this new life stage, it's all about planning ahead. Now obviously that doesn't automatically mean that you can't get to know someone because of planning. However, what I didn't anticipate was that your social circle basically doubles with marriage. Between family, existing friends, new "couples" friends, co-workers from two different jobs, it's a wonder that you can ever even have a significant conversation with any one person. It can really start to feel like you spend most of your time trying to keep track of people instead of really getting to know them or, for existing friends, continue "knowing" them. It normally becomes an hour for coffee or lunch with someone and then you really don't connect with them significantly for another month or so.

Now, I'm a social person. Not in the sense where I need to be friends with everybody on the planet, I just get excited about the friends that I have and I want those relationships to get significant attention. Keeping this in mind, my wife and I had a couple of significant experiences with some friends after we were married that got the brainstorm wheels a turnin'. One experience in particular comes to mind.

Tim and Eve are friends of ours from Denver, Colorado. They were both a part of our wedding and before I knew Alicia (my wife), I had known Tim and Eve for years. The funny thing is, even though I knew them both, especially Tim, for a long time, I feel like our friendship has grown significantly in recent years and we live in different states. They've come to town and stayed at our house a couple of times. We've taken trips to Lake Michigan with them and Tim and I even made the White Castle trek to Lansing. (Tim is big fan of the mid-west and all it has to offer by the way.) Anyway, Alicia and I found our time spent with this other couple to be extremely valuable and we've really discovered that they are very important to us. The only thing is, they live five states away!

How can this be? How is it possible that we feel like we are barely scratching the surface with some of our friends here in town, but are really developing a cool friendship with people that we might see twice a year? Then, it dawned on us. We were carving out significant time for each other. When Tim and Eve come and stay for a few days with us out here in Grand Rapids or when we go to Denver, it seems like everything else in life is put on the back burner a little bit. We want to make sure that they feel comfortable and welcome in our home and city. We want them to have the best experience and so we show them all of our favorite places to go and things to do. They become our priority. Not for an hour, but for days at a time. How could you not be changed by this? Of course you'd get to know someone and develop a significant friendship with a person that you've set aside a week of your time outside of work to hang out with.

What's sad in my opinion, is how infrequently all of us set aside a good chunk of time for someone else. We've got important lives to live. Everybody seems to be on the clock all the time. This discovery with couples like Tim and Eve led my wife and I to a terrific idea. What if we started treating our "in town friends" like "out of town friends"? What would it be like to take somebody that we might run into an a semi-regular basis around town and tell them that we want them to be our out of town friend for a few days or weekend. What if they came to stay with us or us with them even though we only live a few miles apart. We could show them our favorite things about our town and they could show us theirs! Brilliant!

Obviously we can't do this with every friend all at once. What if though, we started planning on setting aside a few days once every couple of months. I know work still needs to happen and usually does when friends come in from out of town as well. However, when you come home your friends are waiting. Ever since this idea came to light we've tried it a couple of times with limited but significant success. What do you think about an idea like this? Does it seem feasible or valuable? How do you develop significant relationships with the friends you have instead of just occasionally touching base? I'd love to know! Life is too short to be too busy. We have to be proactive!

Why Do We "Go" to Church?

Reading something on line through an email or blog post is always tricky because it can be difficult to understand the emotional context through which it was meant to be delivered. As you read the title of this post what kind of emotional assumptions did you make? Maybe you read this and heard a cynical tone from a person who has given in to the futility of the Sunday morning gathering thing we do every week. Maybe you thought of more of a "desire to discover" tone pointing towards a person that really is looking for the deeper connection of why we do what we do with the whole church thing.

No matter what context you might personally put behind a question like this, I believe that almost any American living today would have something to say on the matter. There are a lot of us out there who make attending church a significant part of our weekly routine. Those of us who do might have questions like, "What are we really after here?" or "Which traditions that we engage in are helping us and which traditions are just empty traditions?". There is another group of us Americans that don't make attending a church part of our weekly routine. Those of us who don't might have questions like, "Why do people feel the need to drive to a building every week to connect with God?" or "What on earth do people hope to find spiritually by singing songs and sitting through some lecture every week?". These are obviously just a few of the questions and discussions one might engage in amongst a myriad of possible discussions revolving around this mysterious and strange thing we do every week. I think what's more important than anything is that people continue to ask these questions. We should never stop examining why we do things or don't do things when it comes to spirituality.

That being said, I really find it interesting that over the couple thousand years that Christ's church (including a gaggle of different denominations) has been around, our terminology has shifted some what. When you read about the church in the Bible, it seems that it was something we were to be. Over the years we have somehow adopted the idea that church was something we are supposed to go to. I know that a lot of people that attend a form of Church event might really resonate with both ideas, but I just find it interesting that this developed over the years.

Beyond that, I have to ask myself why I engage with a community every week surrounding the idea of spirituality. Am I attending to grow and develop spiritually? Am I attending to connect with God along with a bunch of other people, believing that something happens when we all try to do that together? (Where two or more are gathered....) Am I attending just because it's something I've done for a long, long time?

All of these things rattle around in my head from time to time. I really do wonder why most people come to church or don't choose to attend and I find the different answers extremely interesting. I'm not pretending that I think there is one hidden answer out there. I just think that when you bring up the topic of this church thing, it's always really enlightening to hear how people engage with this. Why do you "go" to church? Why do you choose to not attend? I would love to hear some opinions here!