Phase 4

I love watching kids at the playground. It's a great picture of how the world could be. One kid may bounce around alone, talking to herself in her imaginary play.  Two or three may stay in a group not letting others in, while another group may start a game of tag inviting all to play. Children have no problem walking up to another child and saying, "Let's play," and they have no problem telling each other when they're mad. There's no hidden agenda or subtleties.

Oh, to be a kid again but know everything that I know now.

[caption id="attachment_590" align="alignnone" width="500"] Photo Credit: Matt Observe Photography via Compfight cc[/caption]

 

Onto Phase 4 of  How to Find Friends...

I thought I'd always been good at the whole  ACCEPT WHO GOD PUTS IN YOUR LIFE AND LOVE THEM phase. Friends have always come easily to me and as a kid I would often take up with the difficult child in the room. I could spot the outsider in a heartbeat and draw them in. I had friends in all types of circles and have never believed in cliques.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

Somewhere along the way, probably in my twenties, I got uncomfortable with disagreeing. I began avoiding it like the plague. I would give my opinion but only if I was sure I wouldn't have to debate. I loathe debating. It makes me feel stupid and uneducated and those are two feelings I do not want to associate with. So I dodged them by dodging people who didn't think and act like me.

Even worse, I started to change my thinking and acting to be more like those around me.

Slight shifts along the way in my parenting and theology led to a monumental modification in how I thought about myself.

I tried to force myself and my family to fit into a box that was fabricated by the world and it wasn't working. I was unhappy, my people were uncomfortable, but people thought we had it going on! Or at least that was my goal. I felt like I was hiding a big, dark secret: we weren't perfect, we didn't have it all figured out and there was no portal leading straight to Jesus in my closet.

What if people knew the truth?

There were a couple of things that forced me to be open with my struggles. We went through a very difficult job transition, my husband's dad was killed in a car wreck, and my children weren't reading as well as I knew they should be (have I talked to you about dyslexia yet?). Like a microwave I was being cooked from the inside out. I was exhausted from keeping it all together so I quit keeping it all together because keeping it together was slowly killing me. 

You know what happened? My friends didn't run away. In fact, they came closer. They opened up about their struggles and that didn't make me run for the hills. In fact it made me love them deeper. The miracle  that happens when people share stuff that's been in the dark is that there's more room for love. For real love.

I had somehow come to think that the more I knew Jesus the more exclusive I should become.

The more I read the bible, though, and the more I delved into who He actually is  the more I understood that Jesus is the king of accepting people and loving them where they're at. Change is not required to get to know Jesus. He takes you right where you're at because he's cool like that. 

My closest friends and I do not agree on everything, and we don't have to. We can discuss religion, women in church, predestination, race, creationism vs. Big Bang, life after death,  the refugee crisis, and/or the state of education in our country without agreeing, because we're in Phase 4 and we ACCEPT WHO GOD PUTS IN OUR LIFE AND LOVE THEM.

This has carried over into my parenting and wifery, too. I accept who my kids and husband are as people and don't worry (quite as much)  what others think. We are who we are.

I  do worry about how polarized our country is when I watch the news or read my Facebook feed. When I turn all that off, though, and start having real conversations with people it forces us to take at least one step toward each other. Talking may not change our position on how we think and feel but it does allow us to see the other persons vulnerability. We need to be able to sit down and have a cup of coffee with someone we don't agree with and still feel love and compassion for them. There's memes all over the place about that, which  means it's science.

If you find yourself unable to talk about your personal thoughts or feelings with your friends you may need to take a look at your friends are. On the other side, if you find yourself bristling when people disagree with you that's probably something you need to address, too. I'm not saying a heated debate isn't a healthy thing. What I am saying  is this: don't change who you are to please friends and don't expect friends to change in order to please you. 

I'm learning that the brave thing to do in this world is to accept who God puts in your life and love them. It doesn't always look like I think it should but I always like how it feels.

[caption id="attachment_591" align="alignnone" width="500"] Photo Credit: icemanphotos via Compfight cc[/caption]

Here's to embracing Phase 4, Brave Misfits!