How do you make friends anyway?

 What was the best advice you received for making new friends?  Did it work?  Or, instead, does it work every single time you're looking for a friend?  How often do you need new friends?  Where do you start?  I seriously think there is an untapped market for an algorithm-based sorting app that matches you up with a potential new friend—a friendship Tinder.  A Friender!  (Sometimes my brilliance for naming things astounds me)  Once that app launches, loneliness will be cured forever. 


The problem with friends isn't that there aren't enough "fish in the sea." The problem is that its hard work to get to the point where being friends doesn't feel like work.  Maybe because we see such amplified and dramatized friendship standards in tv and movies so often that we've been given impossibly high standards?  Yes, I'm talking about you, Gilmore Girls. 


What are the rules anyway?  How do we prioritize all the helpful advice?  Do "birds of a feather flock together" come before "opposites attract?" Or how about finding the line between pursuing a friend and just letting it happen organically?


What if it's God's will for you to be alone till you learn a critical but also unknown lesson?  Now I know enough about the Bible to understand that the last statement isn't biblically accurate.  Still, I also know enough of loneliness that the thought can occasionally take the driver seat of my brain too.  I'm guessing I'm not the only one either.

 

Statistics speak!  According to a 2020 survey from Harvard Graduate School of Education, 36% of all Americans—including 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children—feel "serious loneliness" in this Covid saturated world. 


 As a Christian, my default belief is that divine, perfect, and blessed relationships and community are at the center of the creation narrative and a gift to humanity.  Being fruitful and multiplying isn't just gardening and making babies; it is also spreading the perfect community worldwide.  One of "The Fall" casualties was losing, damaging, corrupting perfect relationships and community.  


Community is needed now more than ever, and we don't need data and statistics to tell us.  We know it to be true, and we feel it in our bones.  We are not without hope, but we are also not without work. 


Dr. Curt Thompson has this brilliant line that I want to share.  He says that "everyone who has ever lived from the moment they come into the world is looking for someone who is looking for them."  


Humanity isn't losing the desire for friendship, but perhaps we're losing the courage required to build a deep and meaningful community. 

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