Jessica Herberger - Break Bread Together: Finding True Friendship at the Last Supper

I used to be so good at friendship. I found joy in my friendships; they filled meup and I poured myself out in them. I loved being a good friend. Somewhere alongthe way of adulthood, motherhood, marriage, and lifes ups, downs, and more downs,I lost my way. I had plenty of ladies in my life, yet I was missing the true enjoymentof friendship. My social calendar was full with coffee dates, playdates, volunteermeetings, and work events. I had more going on than the hours I could reasonablygive to them. I found myself surrounded by people, but I was lonely and missing community.

What had gone wrong?

I had more people in my life than I could keep up with. I had a running list of ladiesI wanted to connect with but didntand all the guilt that goes along with that.I had social media to show me all the parts of my friends lives that I was missing(and the parties I wasnt invited to, either). I was full, stuffed actually, withsocial interactions, and yet I had no breathing room in my interactions. So why wasmy heart was crying out?

I was involved in a group for other moms and a small group from church, I had hundredsof friends on Facebook, and I knew all the moms at my kids school. I would havewonderful conversations with all of these ladies. On paper, it looked as if I wasdoing all the things one is supposed to do to find your tribe, and my calendarcertainly had absolutely no space for any other endeavors. Yet there I was...frustrated, isolated, and firmly without my people. The math wasnt adding up.

In what proved to be a rather brutal exercise, I set out to examine the currentstate of my friendships and community. Now, lets just take a moment and acknowledgehow that sounds. I decided I had to work on friendship. Isnt friendship supposedto be easy? It sounds ridiculous that it was a year and a half of work in my life,but that is the truth because community building requires intentionality. If youwant a deeper relationship with God, you have to spend time with God. If you wanta deeper and more committed relationship with your husband, you have to spend timewith him. It is the same for deep friendship. This feels countercultural to us, butwe need to really push against the notion that friendship is easy or should justfall into place. We need to be intentional! Theres no shame for where you are now,but this is the way to get to where you want to be, and I want you to join me here!

Here is what it boiled down to... I was spending more time (both physically andmentally) on friendlies and not nearly enough on friends. A friendly is what Icall a person in your life who is more than an acquaintance but not a true, deepfriend with whom you can share your heart. You may share pleasant chitchat with afriendly on the sideline of your childs soccer game, or start to realize you havethings in common and even suggest that you get together. With busy schedules andchance meetings, you know it will likely never happen, but you at least attempt it.

Perhaps you share about a current struggle as you are awaiting pickup at school.I would love to talk about this more, you both say (and truly mean), but thereis no follow-up for either of you. Friendlies are the in-between. Some friendliesare not yet friends, while others are considered connected acquaintances. Theyarent the ones you call when you run out of gas with a van full of kids, but morethan likely you comment on pictures they post on Facebook or your kids go to schooltogether.

Once you start to recognize a friendly, you will see there are lots of them in yourlife. Having friendlies in your life is not a bad thing. We need people in our lives,and we are called to be friendly to those we encounter. However, mistaking the plethoraof friendlies in your life for deep friendship and community is a roadblock to cultivatinga true community. We can come to believe the lie that this is what community actuallylooks like. For a season, I made that mistake. I thought because there were so manywomen I was interacting with that I was in community. In reality, I was just keepingmyself busy and not investing deeply in anyone nor allowing them to invest deeplyin me. As I settled into adulthood, I found myself settling for this pale substituteof connected, life-giving friendship. Basically, I had a built a life with lots ofsurface-level friendliness, and it left me feeling deflated. Community, real community,is made with intention and investment, and I was lacking both.

My friendly interactions had become the only interactions I was having. Even more,I had a reactionary position with all these women in my orbit. It felt like I waspouring out to whomever was in front of me with no thought of Is this who I am calledto invest in? There was no intentionality, and the investment I did offer was, sadly,shallow and often short-lived. I was assuming that if someone was saying to me, Letshave coffee or I would love to get the kids together, that they were my person,at least for the moment, and hopefully it would lead to a deeper connection.

In an effort to quench my thirst for depth, I was jumping about from one friendlyto the next, attempting to create belonging and community with the hope of each friendly.And let me tell you, it was exhausting and unfulfilling! And heres the thing: surface-levelrelationships should not be exhausting to us. This happens when we have misplacedexpectations on these friendlies in our lives. Friendlies arent wrong, but if theyare the only people you spend your time on, you will feel depleted because thereis no commitment with friendliesit's sometimes convenient and always casual.

So, as I was left with that nagging longing for community that friendlies were notfilling, I would then fill up on interactions and information on social media. Thechallenge with social media interactions is that we mistake them for social interactions.While social media is not all bad, it will never replace face-to-face relationships.The two are, simply, unequal. One is built around a screen view, and the other isbuilt around the entire view. When we consume a high volume of social media snippetsand information, we fill our minds without gaining the positives of dwelling inauthentic relationship. We use up our capacity to invest emotionally by wastingthat precious resource on our friends sisters cousins wedding.

You know what I am talking about.... I see my friend tagged in a photo....I click and before I know it, I have just spent ten minutes looking through a strangerswedding album and comparing it to my current life.... And, wait, did I go toschool with that girl on the dance floor?... And it looks like one of my sonsclassmates went to Disney... And look at that birthday event that I didnt getinvited to.... We click and we click and we ingest what does not satisfy us aswe watch peoples celebrations through the murky screen of a computer or phone andconvince ourselves we have been filled up with social interactions.

In reality, we have just spent more minutes absorbing other peoples lives withoutinvesting anything in the people who are actually around us. Comparison or jealousyoften seeps in, which leads to feeling isolated, and we close off a part of our heartto a more genuine relationship than what we see with our eyes. Social media can offersome connection, its true, but it is not the way to find community when we are lonely.We walk around with all of this surface-level knowledge of peoples lives swirlingin our brains, yet in our hearts we dont truly know them, and we are not known,either.