We Live, We Love, We LearnPosted by Rick on March 20th, 2010

So, if anyone has known anything about our lives in the past few months, you’ll know that we had a couple of bad experiences with long-time friendships, and those experiences have brought us a lot of hurt.

The two families in question were two childhood friends of Rachel and their spouses. When Rachel and I were first getting to know each other, both couples did not support our courtship. But after things progressed, they changed their minds. Couple #1 repented. Couple #2 pretended that they had always supported us, and said that they really thought what couple #1 did was wrong. Of course, couple #2 had also shunned us, but we didn’t really care that they were trying to cover up our past since they liked us at that point.

After we got married, we moved away, and we became really close with couple #1, with them even visiting us a couple of times. After about a year, we tried really hard to get back to Spokane because we missed both Rachel’s parents and both couples. It took us three years. When we finally got back up, couples #1 and #2 had become really close. Things got tense with couple #1 soon after we moved up, in large part due to how much time we spent with them. We relaxed our relationship, things got better, but damage was done.

Over time, couple #1 made some comments that indicated that there were jealous of how much time we spent with couple #2. Of course, we were jealous of how much time couple #1 spent with couple #2. Couple #2 made comments about how they were jealous of how close we were to couple #1. A triangle of jealousy ensued. In the end, we lost out.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood dimm’d tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

Things fell apart. Both relationships were damaged. And for four months, we tried repairing them. Couple #2 told us they had to pray about being our friends and would get back to us. They never did. We drove couple #1 nuts by trying to get back to a close relationship with them – something they were not able to give. We’re still trying to work on reconciliation with them, but our expectations have been drastically lowered.

Losing those two friendships hurt, but what we hadn’t realized is that we had two other sets of great friends with whom we hadn’t really worked to develop our relationships. Both were also Rachel’s childhood friends and their spouses; both remained friends and supported our relationship in its early stages. And in redeveloping those friendships, I realized that I had put up a wall with both couples #1 and #2. Because of our past history, I didn’t truly put my trust in them. In fact, I always had a deep distrust of couple #2. I used humor to deflect my true feelings a lot. I had never shared my heart in the way that I was now able to share my heart with couple #3, and to a lesser extent, couple #4. And since then, we’ve also developed friendships with 2 other couples. Couple #5 is more a fun-couple – a couple with whom we can have fun, but there is still a wall preventing anything deeper. And we’re okay with that. We’re not trying to turn it into more than it is.

Couple #6 is a set of new friends. We’ve hung out with couple #6 three weeks in a row, and I sense a great compatibility with this couple. Not only is there much commonality in interests, but I feel the same sense of brokenness. They too are in a healing process. They too are in an uncertain time. They have faced judgment. And with this brokenness and uncertainty comes an openness that goes both ways. I don’t mean a relationship that’s based on gossip about our hurts either. It’s not. It’s based on our common faith. It’s based on a willingness to say that we’re broken, hurting, fragile, vulnerable, and a little bit lost – something that’s hard for me to admit. But something that was so easy to release the first time we spent time with them.

Despite losing closeness with two sets of friends, God has used our pain to draw us closer as a couple and closer to Him. He’s provided us with friends who are, by no means, a replacement for our old friends, but who are sets of new beginnings or rejuvenations of seeds long untended.

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