You know that phrase Friends come and go or the one about how God sends you friends, and they stay for different intervals in your life's story?
Sometimes I really hate those lines.
Why? Because I don't like friends entering in and out of my life. But I've had to come to terms with this multiple times over the years. Sometimes, when a friend enters out, it hurts like nothing you have ever felt before.
I had fought with my best friend, my roommate, and we just had not been talking very much with each other. She wanted to solve the problem right away, but because it was finals, I wanted to cool down. Take a few days to just chill, to pray, then to come back with a little cooler heads. Unfortunately I cooled down faster than she did, and thus our friendship basically ended.
I tried to make the effort, although I wasn't very good at it most of the time. But I wanted to reach out. I knew our old friendship was over. It would take a long time to re-build the trust we had in our old relationship, but I knew we could at least start becoming friends again. I could tell she was having a hard time, but I didn't know what to do about it.
Then after several months of awkwardness, I thought we had got a lot of things out on the table. I thought we had started to move forward again.
And then it hit me. I was accused of some things that I didn't do, but people love gossip, and people love to see scandals. I was stuck in that scandal, even though it wasn't true. True I had made some mistakes, but the actual thing I was being accused of had not happened. Eventually, many adults (and of course my close friends) agreed. I was telling the truth. But later, my old friend finally decided to really open up to me.
As we were talking over IM she simply blurted out a lot, and it was too much to handle. She thought I had been lying. And as we talked through why she felt that way, I didn't have all the answers for her. I sat there completely stunned. She thought I was a lesbian, who had made up my boyfriend (whom she had not met) to cover up my relationship with another woman. I sat there not knowing how exactly to respond, and in the end I told her I wasn't lying to her. That the guy I was dating was not something I made up, and that I was hurt that she would think so. That yeah I had been accused of similar things but the "adults" in the situation realized that it wasn't true. People were just saying things. She informed me that she had lived with me long enough and been my friend long enough to know what kind of person I was and continued to push the issue.
I asked other friends if they felt the same way, if they thought I was lying. Half of them looked as if I was completely nuts for even asking them that sort of thing. I prayed a lot about it and finally wrote this friend a letter.
It was a letter of goodbye. I didn't have the answers she wanted. I didn't have anyway of fixing anything. So I told her that I think our trust in each other had been completely destroyed. That if she felt like I was lying, there would be no trust between us and our friendship wouldn't work. I asked her to search herself and God and see if she had truly wanted to be friends with me again in the months past, because she really hadn't acted as such. I apologized and I said that I was seriously saying goodbye. I didn't want to pursue a friendship any time soon, but of course if I were to see her again I would be polite and as always I was keeping her in my prayers.
It was the hardest thing I think I've ever had to. But it has also been a big healing thing. I'm not saying we won't ever be friends again, or that I have this intense hatred towards her. Not at all. Instead I feel a deep ache in my heart for the friend I used to have. I do still pray for her often, and I know that fighting is not the answer in the body of Christ. So that's why I wrote the letter. I knew that the fighting had to stop, that I needed to tell her how I felt, and that I wasn't angry at her, just hurt. That she would always be my sister in Christ, but that for now I think we needed to try to heal and focus on other relationships that weren't completely destroyed.
I don't know that I necessarily did "the right thing". I'm human, I make mistakes on a daily basis. But I know that I felt this huge weight lift when I wrote the letter and sent it to her. And now I am working on not letting the hurt turn to anything nasty and full of hatred. I hope that one day we can be friends again, although I doubt we will ever be close friends.
I don't regret her being in my life. She taught me a lot and helped much on my walk with Abba, but every time I pray about why something like that would happen I feel like God gives me the answer.
We all change and grow, and sometimes we grow apart. We grow closer to some friends, and farther from others. She wasn't meant to be this long time friend that I would have for the rest of my life, but she was a great friend. A sister. We may not be in each others weddings, but we can look back and say, yeah I had this great friend who was like a sister to me in college.
God gives us people who help us grow, to change, to be the people he is creating us to be. Sometimes we get hurt in the process, but pain is not a bad thing. As long as we learn from that pain, and don't let it become all consuming.
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