Last night I had the immense pleasure of reuniting with the wonderful team that accompanied me on Change the Truth’s first mission trip to Uganda.
These people have become my very good friends. Trust me, when you spend so much time together in such an emotionally charged situation, it’s simply what happens – you get pretty close. After all, we saw each other first thing in the morning, we saw each other exhausted, we saw each other un-showered and without makeup, we saw each other in tears, we saw each other outside of our comfort zones, we saw each other make fools of ourselves dancing or trying to speak another language or trying to get a handle on our often gut wrenching sadness. And we had many hours to talk and get to know things about each other that usually take a long time to discover. For example, one night at dinner, someone posed this question: “What is your greatest fear?” You get the picture.
We got together last night to share pictures, talk about what it’s been like coming back home and watch a video that Lynne lovingly assembled in our honor.
Once you’ve been on a trip like this, you realize that the people with whom you shared the experience fall into a new category of friendship. You share something that no one else can truly understand, so that makes the relationship unique. And in that context grows an opportunity to explore a side of yourself that can, under ordinary circumstances, be hard to access.
There are plenty of books and websites that can be helpful in a search for just the right volunteer vacation for you/ your family. I highly recommend looking into it. And if you are interested in joining CTT on the 2008 trip, let me know.
Based on all the hugs, laughter and tears I saw us sharing last night (not to mention the profound work that was performed while we were at the orphanage!) I guarantee you that the trip was one of the best gifts we have ever given to ourselves.
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Thinking about friendships brought this passage from Lauren Winner to mind:
I don’t have childhood friends, not the kind of friends who were born two days after you and then you were in the same play group and you went to school together and now that you’re forty-five you vacation together every year and you know each other better than chemists know the periodic table….. There are a few people out there with whom you fit just so, and, amazingly, you keep fitting just so even after you have growth spurts or lose weight or stop wearing high heels. You keep fitting after you have children or change religions or stop dyeing your hair or quit your job at Goldman Sachs and take up farming. Somehow, God is gracious enough to give us a few of those people, people you can stretch into, people who don’t go away, and whom you wouldn’t want to go away, even if they offered to.
….I was lying on my couch one night, reading a book about friendship by Beth Kephart. She writes about how friends are hard to make and hard to lose and how the only vocabulary we have for those losses is break-ups, romantic ones, but often the splitting apart of friends is harder, rarer, more long-lasting, grievous and generally devastating than any run-of-the-mill lovers’ spat. My body lay on the couch like a valley… There I lay, listing all the friendships I had lost, all the people I’d betrayed or misled or just not kept up with, and then I felt gratitude again, felt it this time no less physically than hunger, felt the weight of it like a fog settling in over my stomach, felt it filling me heavy the way fruit fills a basket. Lying on the couch, I could not believe God had given me all these people to love. Even if I never had another friend ever, even if I spent the next seventy-five years rattling around lonely as a ghost of Christmas past, it would be too much ever to repay, all that love. I slept on the couch, then, blanketed by the weight of my gratitude, Beth Kephart’s book under my pillow.
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