Stickers and Handstands

When I was in first grade, my best friend’s name was Elizabeth, and she was in the class above me. I thought it was pretty cool, of course, that my best friend was a year older; she introduced me to all the year older girls, let me play in their year older games, and even, even, let me trade stickers from her year older sticker book.

It was pretty amazing.

When my kids ask me what I did for fun when I was younger, trading stickers is the first thing that comes to mind.  Honestly, though, I don’t blurt this out because, well, trading stickers was my most fun.   I’m not quite sure my kids would look at me the same way again, so I just kind of sneak it in there with my list of other super fun childhood activities: swimming, playing school with my sisters, climbing trees, making up dances, playing in the creek behind my house, stickers (a real quick mention), and Barbies.

There were a lot of Barbies.

But there were also a lot of stickers, and trading them was my activity of choice.  I still remember exactly what my sticker book looked like:  neon blue with characters across the front.  It was amazing.  The stickers were removable from each page, and so trading them became my favorite pastime.  And this is how Elizabeth and I became friends.  She brought her sticker book to school one day, and it was as if our stickers books found each other and we followed behind.  Every day at recess we would show any new stickers we’d come across and trade what we considered worthy of trading, making each page as perfect as possible.  Recess rocked.  And so did my sticker book.

For obvious reasons I have never admitted the above paragraph to my teenage children and probably will not do so for a long time.  Maybe ever.

But the truth is, as much as I loved my stickers, I loved my friend even more.  We had stickers in common (amongst other important things…like Barbie dolls) and I remember being perfectly excited every time I had the opportunity to go to her house. Friendship is such a beautiful thing.  I believe it’s one of God’s greatest blessings, and I’m thankful for the friendships I’ve had throughout my life, but there’s something about childhood friendships that depict what’s really at the heart of this kind of relationship.

I asked my daughter Lily the other day who her best friend is.  When she told me the name, I asked her why this person is her best friend.

“Because we both do the swings at recess, mom.”  

Right.  Duh.

Stickers…barbies…swings…all the important things that bring kids together.

A good friend snapped this picture of Lily and her daughter doing hand stands together (or something along those lines).  When my friend sent the picture, she said in the text:  “Friendship is refreshing as a kid.  You can do crazy things and just be loved no matter what.”  That reality made her ponder why as adults we tend to complicate friendships.  Perhaps, she said, “we should all start doing hand stands with our friends.”

Cheers to that.  Or trade stickers.  One or the other.

I’ve done a lot of reflecting on the importance of friendship over the last several weeks, often while working on this website,  and much of what I have considered reminds me of these childhood friendships.  What is it that produces a good, faithful friendship?  Here are just four components that I’m learning need to be present:

Commonality

CS Lewis says this in his book, The Four Loves:

Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other;
Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.

Stickers.   We had the ridiculous hobby of stickers in common, Elizabeth and I, and through the years, the friendships in my life that have grown into lasting relationships have been full of commonalities:  faith, food, college, running, music, kid’s ages, hobbies, and the list goes on.  Friendship often begins and blossoms when, as CS Lewis puts it, one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”

I have a fear of oversized things.  This has made sense to no one.  Ever.  Until it made sense to someone…because this someone also has a fear oversized things.  I didn’t even have to explain to her how I can’t visit the Arch in St. Louis unless I keep my eyes planted on the ground. I didn’t have to go into the details of how my body reacts if I stand in front of a cruise ship.  Abnormally big defeats me, and she got it with very few words of explanation.  When I discovered this commonality, I couldn’t stop:

Whales.  “Yes!” And all I needed to say was “whales.”

Huge Ships.  “Killer!”  She got me at “huge.”

Hummers.  OK, maybe she didn’t quite get that…but still.

It was a “What!  You too?” kind of moment since I thought no one but myself was odd enough to have heart palpitations when things are big.

Simplicity

We tend to complicate friendships.  And mostly it’s because we live in a broken world.  Until things are fully restored, most things will be more complicated than they should be, but there is no doubt that many of us can do a better job of simplifying our relationships.

Friendship does not require a perfectly clean house; it doesn’t require a sink without dirty dishes, laundry folded and not sitting out, and it doesn’t even require the best meal you’ve ever made in your entire life.  The kids and their hand stands are a refreshing picture of this simplicity.  Friendship is not about the production. It’s about the person.  

Of course this seems obvious enough, but unfortunately things like social media have so skewed our sense of what we should be doing and how we should be doing it that it becomes hard to decipher what an actual friendship looks like.  Forget the picture and focus on the person.  We need to stop comparing our lives to one another, competing with each other over whose kids eat better, sleep better, or dress better, and we can’t keep judging those who don’t do life quite the same way we do.

Friendship is not produced nor does it flourish when we complicate the relationships by letting the insignificant dominate our attitudes toward each other.  Sometimes friendship is about looking in the face of a fellow mom who is sleep deprived, anxious, or just overwhelmed and empathizing rather than remedying.  See their face, hear their soul, and listen rather than judge.  Listen.  Something as simple as listening is deeply and profoundly necessary in a friendship.

I asked my eight year old how she slept the other night, and this is the conversation that ensued (which I wrote down after the fact because, well, some conversations should never, ever be forgotten):

“Hey, Lil.  How did you sleep?”

“Not good, Mom.”

“Why?”

“Because of the Mona Lisa, Mom.”

“Oh.”

“Mom, it’s just that I couldn’t’ stop thinking about why in the world she didn’t smile for her picture.  I mean what in the world made her so sad?  And then I kept wondering who took her picture and if he asked her to smile.   And then I kept wondering about how she died.  I mean, did she ever get happy before she died?  I just wish I knew but I don’t know, so I just kept thinking about why in the world her face was so sad.”

Of course that’s why you didn’t sleep.  I should have known.  The Mona Lisa kept you awake.  Duh.

My girl.  As strange as her mind can be, I learn a lot from her sensitivity:  See life from someone else’s perspective and wonder….why aren’t they smiling?  And then, simply,  listen and enjoy the mere company of a friend.    

Availability 

Proverbs 27:10  says, “Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away.”

With both parents in heaven, I have relied much on my two sisters even though we live far from each other.  We call and text daily about, well, everything:  Does THIS outfit look OK?  Do these shoes match these pants?  If  the waffles have some black stuff on them, should I pitch them?  How long can milk sit out on the counter?  The chicken smells funny…pitch, right?  Look at THIS spider – is it bad?  How bad?  And possibly one of my favorites ever:  My kid pooped her pants then hid the poop.  What should I do?  

So, as nice as it is that we have each other for these life altering problems and decisions, there are certain situations that my sisters are just not available for because they don’t live lose by.  And so my friendships are essential, as are theirs.

When my mom was sick, there were some days when I needed someone to pick up the kids from school, run to the store when I was out-of-town, or just listen to my grief through sentences that made little to no sense.  And friends were available for all these things, as inconvenient as it may have been for them.  I can’t help but think about how easily this comes in our childhood friendships: You don’t have to do hand stands or stickers alone.  I’ll do them with you!  Several dear friends entered into the craziness that was my life for several years and did it with me.  Even writing this brings tears of gratitude at each memory of a friend reaching out their hand with generous availability in a time of need.

Admittedly, I’m not often very good at this in my friendships.  I get so schedule oriented that I forget that interruptions aren’t always interruptions but a part of what it means to live in community:  watching someone’s child even if it’s a last-minute request, making a dinner with what you’ve got in the house for someone who had a rough day, or even giving a few extra minutes to run an errand for someone who has a new baby.  These aren’t interruptions!  In our friendships, these are blessed opportunities to be available in order to show tangible love.

Refining 

There is not a greater verse that portrays what this looks like in friendship than Proverbs 27:17:  “As Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”  The assistant pastor at our church reminded us in a sermon a few weeks ago that, “We’re made to live in community.  We are shaped as we live life with one another.”   And this refining and shaping by our friends begins at such a young age.

But even as adults, we should be sharpening and shaping each other by encouraging creativity, cheering on passions and talents, strengthening judgments…in every respect we should be making a friend a better person.  And we can’t do this if we aren’t honest and vulnerable with each other; we can’t sharpen if we’re complicating our friendships unnecessarily, unavailable to help a friend out, or simply uninterested in the details of their life.  Sharpening takes a little work from both people involved, but the process is effective and the result is beautiful.

I can’t tell you how grateful I am for a sweet community of friends who helped build this website.  In the bigger picture of life,  it’s something seemingly small, but I’m grateful beyond measure for this tangible example of friendship:  friends who offered their honesty and encouragement (So, your current blog site needs a little work), friends with a common goal in wanting to see my passions take fruition (Can I help you build a website?), friends who kept it simple (Here are several critiques, not hurtful criticisms), and friends who made themselves available to do things like take pictures of an awkward adult who laughed every time the photographer said, “Let’s try a more serious one.”  I learned much from a precious community of friends.  Would I give up the time they did to help a computer ignorant, non-artistic (stick figures are the extent of my artsy ability), and impatient friend who doesn’t proofread well?

I hope I would.  To assist in the sharpening and shaping of another person….I certainly hope I would.  Trading stickers was the way we did it as children.  As adults we show faithfulness in our friendships in these other ways.

And it can be just as amazing.