You've Got a Friend in Me

Jess: As our good friends Josh, Sarah, Ben, Kate, and Kelly prepare to move away and leave us youngin's to fend for ourselves at the seminary, Wes and I decided it was time to talk about friends. We've really been thinking about how different our post-college relationships are from the ones that we made at TLU. 

After practically living with our friends at TLU over our four years there, moving up here seemed like moving into a void. Our friends were in Texas, and we had no idea how to make new friends up here. Even though we lived in the seminary housing, surrounded by other seminary students, we had a hard time joining the community. This was partially due to moving mid-year, me working 20 minutes away at odd hours of the day, and just general exhaustion from our whirlwind Christmas, wedding, honeymoon, cross-country trip month. 

As I worked at Starbucks, I started to make some friends. One of them, Jessica, happened to be a fellow seminary wife from California. Our mutual climate woes, seminary experiences, and Starbucks life made us fast friends, and we hung out from time to time outside of work. She and her husband moved to Iowa last June, though, and although we've kept in contact, that's not quite the same as having friends here. I had other friends from work, but anyone who is friends with their coworkers knows how difficult it is to have both a professional and a social relationship with people--I generally had to choose between the two. I still have some great friends from Sbux, but I've lost contact with most of them in the months since I quit. 

Meanwhile, we started regularly attending Prince of Peace, a Lutheran church in nearby Princeton Junction. Our seminary acquaintance, Josh, happened to be one of the interns there, and we started attending Theology on Tap, a Sunday night Bible study with a few people from the church. This is where some of our best NJ friendships have formed. We see these people almost every week, and when we're not having Bible studies, we have parties and get togethers at each other's houses, and just have a good time.

Not long after we started attending this study, we started to hang out with Josh and Sarah outside of school time. All of a sudden, we had friends who wanted to have us over for dinner, play awesome games and just hang out. We've had dinner together almost every month, even after we moved far, far away and now we have to drive to see each other instead of just yelling out of our living room window. Josh and Sarah have been great supporters of our ministry, jobs, school work, etc. They've definitely become an integral part of our lives up here in NJ, and I don't know what we're going to do without them.

All this rambling to say that Wes and I have had to completely rethink our method of making friends. No longer can we count on dinners in Hein, chapel services, class together, etc. to help us make awesome friends. We've had to go outside of our little bubble, invite people over, meet up for dinner or coffee, find common interests, and actually work on building our relationships. And on top of all of that, we have this whole marriage thing to contend with. We have very few single friends up here. Wes has single friends and I have single friends, but we as a couple have very few. It seems so much easier for us to make couple friends as a couple, and work on retaining our individual relationships from Texas. This last year and a half has taught us what it means to be independent adults building friendships. 

On a completely different note, I've started a new blog about a project I'm doing this summer. Here you go: http://jesusified.blogspot.com/




Wes: So I like reading blogs. We have a lot of good friends who have a lot of worthwhile things to say, and I like to stay up-to-date on it all. One of blogs that I read is by my pastor's wife, Kim Barnett. Although I've only gotten to hang out with Kim a couple times, I feel like I've gotten to know her well by journeying through life with her in her blog. She and Ryan just got back from a three-month mission excursion in Rwanda, and they were both great at sharing on a regular basis what was going on in their lives while over there. In her blog a few weeks' ago, she made the comment that every married couple should spend three months in a foreign country where neither speak the language because it helps you grow closer together as a couple and learn to depend on each other. 


I would add to her statement that moving to another state where you don't know anyone to attend a seminary where everyone is smarter than you can do that same thing. Jess and I were flung into a world that, though it seemed so similar on the surface to life at TLU, was completely different than anything we'd known before. There was no safety net for us to fall on. We were by ourselves. And coming in at the semester as we did, there weren't even other couples who were dealing with the same thing we were. Everyone had their group, and we struggled with fitting in to any of them. 


I didn't realize until we moved up here how much I depended on my friends and my community for love and support. I didn't realize how much I fed off of and relied upon the interactions with friends and family until those interactions were cut off. It was hard. 


Now don't get me wrong. The people at the seminary, at Starbucks, and at Crosswicks and Ellisdale have been wonderful! We've had a great time and met some amazing people. But the setting, the atmosphere, and the environment are so different than anything I've dealt with before. Most of the people at seminary, with the exception of a handful (and most of them are leaving today or within a month), are fellow students, classmates, and our relationships don't get much deeper than that. Since I'm a pastor now, I've also had to learn the definition of what a  church friend is. I can be close to my parishioners, but some lines cannot and should not be crossed with them. 


I guess what we're saying is that being an adult can kinda suck. We've lucked out in that we've made some connections up here with some amazing people, but friendship takes a lot more work than it does when you not only have class every week with someone but you also live in the same building, eat at the same places, etc... I understand why my parents cherished the time they could spend with their friends while I took it for granted.


So, for our friends in Texas, New Jersey, and everywhere else on God's green earth, we love you and we thank God for the blessing of having you in our lives. And for everyone in the Princeton/Bordentown area (or really anywhere in New Jersey. Let's face it. This state is tiny!), we have are currently accepting applications for friendship. Resumes must be sent with a cover letter and three non-relative references. 




You stay classy, World Wide Web!




Jess and Wes