I am learning that friendship needs a sustained curiosity to last the distance.  Last week I sat by a pool with a couple of good friends. We sat in the shade, ate snacks and swapped book recommendations between dips into the glistening water.  It has been over fifteen years since we forged our friendship. One of us has an appetite for bike riding, another loves attending live country music and the third enjoys ocean swimming. Perhaps these interests have not changed much over the years, but we have. We attend different kinds of churches, have different strengths and have not followed the life paths that we expected for ourselves when we were in our twenties.  Nonetheless, we enjoy a warm curiosity towards one another that has sustained and deepened our friendship. If we had assumed on being the same people that we were when we met, our friendships may not have continued. 

See the galahs, the galahs, 

sitting on the powerlines! 

See how they laugh, they laugh, 

like mums on the sidelines 

Community is beautiful and needed but I haven’t always believed this. I once thought I could grow in my faith without Christian community. So much so that I chose to leave church because I believed I didn’t “need it”. This was a selfish and prideful viewpoint, but did I see it as that at the time? Most certainly not. I was blinded by my own behaviour. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was protecting myself. I thought it’d help me to heal. I couldn’t be further from the truth.