My Friend Who Almost Wasn’t

She stands over six feet tall and doesn’t mind sliding a cuss word into a conversation. I am five three on a good day and have been advised from birth that swearing is bad bad bad.  She moved into the gray house across the street just weeks after we finished unpacking our new home.

I had been a stay-at-home mom for several years by then, so this mama was pretty isolated from the outside world, spending my time officiating little boys’ living room wrestling matches and teaching them that “thou shalt not kill” applies to them too. The thought of befriending the woman across the street was unnerving.

She was not like me in stature or personality. She was outspoken, and I feared saying the wrong thing. She seemed to have it all together, and I figured she didn’t want Little Miss Christian to mess up her happy home.  Besides, if I said something she didn’t like, I was pretty sure she could crush me.  She was Goliath, only female and pretty. I was any one of those guys in Saul’s army who was too much of a weenie to go head-to-head with the big guy.

I wanted to hide out in my cozy house, but God had other plans. He blessed us each with boys who quickly became buddies, and it was like He said,

“There, now you have something in common. Go be her friend. You will like her. Trust me.”

Hesitantly, I stepped out my front door and talked with the woman who had so intimidated me. After that initial conversation, we had another and another and another. Though it took a while for me to relax around this stranger who was becoming my friend, I found the more time I spent with her, the more I liked her.

I also learned that though she looked completely self-assured, she wasn’t. And after I fumbled through telling her how much my relationship with Jesus means to me while we were on a garage sale marathon, she didn’t stiff arm me. In fact, she welcomed me into her life; the good, the bad and the ugly. As we started to share our lives my faith deepened and hers blossomed.

I taught her how to find a chapter and verse in the Bible. She encouraged me to be the confident woman Christ wants me to be. We no longer live across the street from each other, but we remain close friends with a bond of faith. I recently moved to a new home, and I’m sure I will meet neighbors who look self-assured from the outside, but I know that outward appearance does not represent what’s going on under the skin. And who knows, I may just make another friend. – ( originally published in Just Between Us, Summer 2012)

This story about my relationship with my awesome friend is  a reminder to me :

to stop making judgments  about what’s going on inside the hearts of other people

that just because people look like they’ve got it together doesn’t mean they do (We’ve all got our stuff don’t we?)

and some of the best friendships are with people whose personalities are quite different from my own.