Ever since moving to the DC metro area in my 20s, making friends has always been somewhat of an enigma.

Mostly because growing up (and through no merit of my own), I’ve always kind of tripped into really good friendships. Like, I didn’t seek them out, but when it came down to it, I was surrounded by the exact people I needed in my life to help me grow and become the person that I am today. They helped me bloom where I was planted, if you will (I really love that saying, I just had to fit it in at some point haha).

Fast forward to now, and it feels like it’s common knowledge that when you’re an adult, friendships are a lot harder to come by. I used to think that it must be because of how transient people are in this area — people are here for 1 or 2 years at a time, and then they move across the country or to a completely different country. So people don’t want to try setting down roots, or establishing relationships.

When I became a stay-at-home mom, I used to think that friendships were so hard because I wasn’t working. I wasn’t showing up somewhere everyday where the odds of meeting someone who was friendship-material were much higher than they are now, where I tend to literally stay at home and hide from the world whenever I felt my introvert tendencies kicking in.

I used to think that friendships were so hard because I was married and I had a family. I had a newborn, then I had 2, then I had 2 kids under 5. The list could go on and on.

Lately, I’ve come to realize that while those things I listed above may be true to some extent, I think that the idea that “Friendships are so hard” is really just a lie that I’ve been fed by the Enemy.

Have you ever noticed how often Scripture references community?

As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another – Proverbs 27:17, NIV

Two are better than one: They get a good wage for their toil. If the one falls, the other will help the fallen one…Where one alone may be overcome, two together can resist. A three-ply cord is not easily broken. – Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, NABRE

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. – John 15:13, ESV

Therefore, encourage one another and build one another up, as indeed you do. – 1 Thessalonians 5:17

By believing that “friendships are so hard,” I was living a life that felt more and more isolated, that made me believe that I was alone and unseen.

And the crazy thing, is that I believed all of this while I was a part of TWO moms groups, a frequent participant in small groups, the choir. I was constantly putting myself out there and literally volunteered the crap out of everything.

It wasn’t for lack of trying that I wasn’t experiencing freedom in this, it was this belief that friendship was just a perk of being human — not a necessity.

I’ll continue more on this in the next blog post 🙂