Maintaining Friendships on the Road

According to Our World Data, if you are a keen conversationalist, on average you will talk to three new people each day. Then by the time you are 73 years-old, you will have spoken to 80,000 people!

I'm not saying I'm a keen conversationalist, but I am keenly extroverted. I'm also quite a "maintainer". I try to maintain meaningful relationships like I try to maintain a clean house--chipping away a little each day. It has taken me forty years to realize that the longer I live, the more friendships I will have to simply let go. The random world statistic transforms my seemingly honorable habit into an exhausting and impossible endeavor. But how does one know which relationships to maintain over the course of a lifetime and which to let go?

One of the hardest things about our mobile lifestyle is the lack of consistent community. We meet people and then stay in touch for a few months, but it quickly fades. Or we connect our kids with other kids only to say good-bye at the end of the week. We have deep, meaningful conversations with strangers, and then never speak again. There have only been a few rare exceptions over the past year and a half on the road.

Our relationships from back east are different too. Some people stay in touch, others feel forgotten. Either way, there is distance and change that have altered friendships. Yet with global connectivity today, we can actually maintain relationships with 80,000 people in a single day if we want. Unfortunately, like many unhealthy tech habits, this is not very beneficial to our emotional well being.

Some of us thrive with very few friends while others of us need a lot of interaction with other people. I, personally, grapple with a sense of belonging on the road. I ask myself, "Who are my friends now?" or "Where do I really belong." or "Who can I actually identify with?"

Recently I was chatting with one of the "three new people" I meet every day-- a husband and wife on their weekend-getaway, and somehow we connected over our lack of "belonging." Even though they lived in a large neighborhood with conjoined school groups, communal activities, and tons of friends, this couple felt that they didn't really "belong anywhere." They felt everything was polarizing in their California suburb, and they didn't fit into one of the designated boxes outfitted for them.

I also heard from an old coworker/close friend a few weeks back, and she said that despite having consistent colleagues, regular community, and plenty of friend groups, she was going through a season of loss and grief that made her feel isolated and alone. She wasn't sure where she "belonged" either.

It seems we are all trying to navigate "belonging" and decipher real friends from the "new people we meet each day." Much of the navigational confusion happens from hurt. We have all at one time or another been misunderstood or left out in relationships. Like a dropped call, we are left confused and guarded.

However, more often than not, it's just part of cyclical, relationship-weeding. It's the nature of humans and vulnerability. Like plants, we prune over the years. We are not meant to maintain thousands of friends anymore than we are meant to cultivate every plant under the sun. Each place we put down roots will grant us different fruit. Some we can take with us, others must stay in the soil where they were best suited to grow. The same is true with relationships.

I have found that the deepest and purest ones have nothing to do with time or place. Whether they last for a moment or a lifetime, true friends worth cultivating for any amount of time are the ones with hearts intertwined in prayer.

Such people meet you where you are, or they meet you in heaven, but either way, they are forever family because they never stop praying for you. They assume charitably, hope positively, and forgive easily. They share vulnerability and authenticity by generously granting grace and love. These are friends I keep in my heart as we travel. These people may not "do life" with me daily, but we are praying through life together because our belonging, our sense of identity, is really only found in Jesus.

~Maintaining friends Carefully and Carelessly