When I first became a mother, I had no friends. No one I knew had kids. The people I was close to in my youth had faded away, and the friends I had made in Washington I severed myself from with my divorce. After that, I got involved in MOPs and made a few friends, but they had mostly left Montana, so here I was second time around, a stay at home mom with a new baby (and an older one), and few close friends. I was praying for God to give me the kind of friend who knew me the way my childhood best friend had, but one who loved Jesus, and understood what life as a mom was like, someone who would recognize my weird and love me because of it.
One day, after I had been blogging for a little while, a stranger started following my tiny blog. I noticed we had a few mutual facebook friends, so I figured she must have seen it through them. I asked my friend Jamie about this girl, because I am insatiably curious, or nosey, whatever, and she exclaimed, "That's the girl who brought me to Christ!" Cool. She lives in Billings, maybe this is the friend I prayed for.
Or maybe not. Just a few weeks later, she moved to North Dakota, the friendship wasteland, the one that also ate my friend Lisa. ( You North Dakota, are a greedy, friend stealing, dirty word.) I almost thought, I shall not bother investing in getting to know someone with whom I can not drink coffee, but Jenn, she has a way of butting all up in your business, you know, when you need it. She ended up meeting Lisa, and becoming friends with a girl I used to work with, and I ended up meeting people here that she knew to the point of, this is getting weird...She understands things about me that no one else does , because we both sing, and put it aside for a time, because we both write, because we both like to say things strait up, and take things that way too, because we both did things before Jesus that felt irredeemable, and received redemption anyway, and a thousand other tiny similarities. And girlfriend has five, FIVE! kids, so my mama woes ain't (I just said ain't in my writing :/) got nothing (double negative!!) on this girl.
Because the only way we knew each other was by following each others blogs, (which by the way, she just "stumbled" upon, no mutual friends involved), and facebook, and an uncanny number of mutual friends, and a couple of extremely awkward phone conversations, we basically skipped the small talk phase of friendship....like, I know almost nothing about her at all, except for intimate details, and visa versa. It's like friendship backwards. I love it. I hate that blind date phase anyway; this is more like arranged marriage or something, God's like, you guys are going to be soul friends, you can figure that other stuff out later, or in heaven, no hurry really. She senses things, like when I need prayer, or what I might be leaving out of a conversation, or how something in my life felt, and I don't have to bother with how often we have to get together to maintain a friendship or not hurt her feelings (because I'm kind of a hermit) . It's lovely.
And I don't have to be sad when she moves, which she recently did, to Florida, where she is buying a yellow house with a porch to settle down in, so we can sit on our yellow porches, half a world away and pray for each other and smile. God has given me other great friends in that time, but Jenn is unique to me. A gift given not how I wanted it, but in the best, best possible way, just how God likes to give gifts, unexpected, and better that you would have picked yourself.
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