I am writing a series on lessons learned from our recent move to Colorado. This post is a meditation on friendship.
I learned a song as a child, “Make New Friends but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” I realized recently that I learned that as a girl scout. The Bible would concur that friends are valuable, whether old or new. Proverbs 17:17 reads: “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” Sadly, I have very few friends from my childhood or youth. As I went through papers from my childhood, I found notes from middle school friends, cards and letters from old boyfriends, and some correspondence from favorite teachers. I lost touch with them all and that made me sad.
Starting in college, I made friendships that endured. I had three wonderful roommates in college, and we have kept in touch, meeting up at major reunions and zooming since Covid. I also made a host of friends through the Princeton Christian Fellowship, who have become like family to Bill and to me. Decades of ministry enlarged that family. Year after year, beloved students came and left, but my consolation was that many of them returned to Princeton for reunions and other reasons, and I was there to receive their visits. God kept enlarging our hearts, making room for loving relationships to continue forming with members of the entering classes. Bill and I both believe these students kept us young and flexible even at the same time as the Scriptures kept us anchored in unchangeable truths. When our children were still under our roof, the presence of college students in our lives was an encouragement to their faith and a blessing, even though the students vied for our time in competition to the needs of our family. Edith Schaeffer’s book What Is A Family? taught me the analogy of a “door with hinges and a lock,” which signified that a family must sometimes open the door to include and shelter many people and sometimes close and lock to provide the time and privacy needed by the nuclear family. Protecting family life makes sense in the larger picture of friendship because after all, family members rank among our most enduring friendships.
Inevitably as we aged, our children moved away and God gave us grandchildren. We began to desire to use our declining energy and our time to focus more on family. Hence, the move to Colorado and the shift from full time ministry to part-time. We wanted to move into the mountains and have a big yard in part for our grandkids to enjoy. But there is room for new friendships, too. As we were looking for houses, Bill asked our realtor if he thought we would be isolated in the mountains. He told us that people who live in the mountains don’t really want to get to know their neighbors. They move to the mountains to get away and have privacy. He encouraged us to look for our new community in places like church, which we planned on doing anyway. We started our search for a church and were reassured to find multiple churches in the area which preached the good news about Jesus Christ clearly.
However, God had providentially planted us in a neighborhood where there really is genuine community. Back in February, when we closed on the house, our daughter, Sarah, went to the house for the “walk through.” While she was there, our neighbor, Bruce, bounded over the property line to introduce himself and to ask Sarah who was moving in. He enthusiastically invited Bill via Sarah to join a group of men who walked together and called themselves the Woodside Rangers. Then in March, we went to our new house to do some painting in advance of moving in, and we met Bruce in person. Again, he invited Bill to join the Rangers. He explained that the walk began at 6:45 AM and that it was NOT an aerobic experience because they stop frequently to talk with people they encounter along the route. Their first priority is people, and their second is exercise. Those of you who know me well know that when I exercise, I prioritize the workout. I am learning to prioritize friends here in Pine.
In August, when we took up residence on Woodside Drive, Bill began to join the Rangers for their morning walk. Some of them have been friends for 30 years or more. They have welcomed Bill warmly. Bill commented in the first several weeks here that he has not spent time daily with any consistent group of people since school days. In our 39 years of ministry, we did not have an office where we all showed up daily and organically had opportunities to talk about our daily lives. Many days the Rangers talk about home maintenance, health, or their families. They have a rule against talking about religion and politics. They break the rules occasionally and begin to talk about politics; when the discussion heats up, they invoke the rule and change the subject. All of them are older than us, in their 70’s and 80’s, which is a huge change from spending our days with college students and colleagues that are all younger. Through the Rangers, I have met several women, and I walk somewhat less regularly with them. We have observed that members of this community serve one another, particularly when there are health related needs as there inevitably are with this age demographic. I have been convicted about my own lack of availability in the past to care practically for members of my community. I am inspired by these new friends to make this more of a priority.
Bill also mused that if we live here long enough, we may attend funerals of Rangers and their wives. Life could end for anyone at any time, but there is a sense in which the older we get, the closer we are getting to the end of our lives. For this reason, Bill and I cannot completely obey the rule to refrain from talking about religion. We will seek to be respectful, of course. They all know that we are Christians, and that Bill is an ordained minister. When he first showed up to walk, there was brief joking about watching their language around their new minister friend. Perhaps they are showing some restraint, but perhaps not!
We jumped in right away meeting new people and locating a new church. It was quite time consuming along with trying to get moved in and spend time with family in Denver. Sometime in September, I realized that I had not updated my old friends on how it was going. One reached out to ask me, which prompted that realization. How do we maintain friendships once we have moved away? We all have such busy lives, and we mostly maintain friendships which have regular points of intersection, whether neighboring front porches, church on Sundays, staff meetings, work appointments, holiday gatherings…New friends are beginning to fill those time slots! Fortunately for me, many years of practice maintaining relationships with alumni are coming in handy, and I am working on a plan. It won’t be a perfect plan, nor will its execution be consistent. Happily, I have found most people are gracious about the lack of regularity of contact, and thankful for occasional connection. It is a joyous thing to open our email and see a greeting from an old friend. I welcome being reminded of a continuing desire for friendship, because in my late 60’s people do slip my mind. It is a privilege also to carry in prayer the burdens of others and to be able to speak continually about our Father who will never forget any one of us.