grown-up friends.

You know when you were a kid on Christmas morning, and you woke up and realized your parents had bought you the best present ever? And you’d look over and see them smiling, so proud of their gift, so happy for you, and you’d jump up and give them a long, tight hug?

Sometimes, I feel that way about God.

Thursday night, while driving away from a gathering of friends, I was filled with this overwhelming sense of gratitude, of joy. And I just wanted to be able to give God the same kind of hug I give my parents when they are oh so good to me. I wanted God to know that this life, these gifts, they aren’t wasted on me. I love them; I appreciate them. I am grateful.

When I graduated from college and made the decision to move back to Tallahassee, I was nervous. That hadn’t been the plan. But an upcoming marriage and a paying job changed the plan, and my old home became my new home, and I wondered if I would ever fit back into that already-completed puzzle.

I floundered for a bit, trying to figure out where and with whom I belonged. I quickly learned that college isn’t really very much like real life. There are no built-in social clubs. Your best friends don’t live right next door. You don’t live and eat and work and play with the same people day in and day out, and as a result, intimacy and community are hard to come by. I realized that those friendships, those three all too brief years, were a rare gift.

And now, as I look at the group of friends that God miraculously brought together in this college town, I realize I have been given another gift.

For months, I wondered if I’d be able to grow up here, be able to reach adulthood in this town where I’d played little league basketball and graduated top in my class. I wondered if I could find kindred spirits hidden among the colleagues and the acquaintances, the mean girls and the girls who didn’t need me quite like I needed them.

But I did.

Somehow, some way, by, I believe, a miracle of the Father, I did.

Through that first paying job, through book club, through friends of friends of friends, I found my community. I found where I could grow up and belong.

And guess what? It’s not like college. We don’t all live in the same apartment complex (though some of us do); we aren’t all in the same life stages (though some of us are). But God saw fit to give us the gift anyway. 

Girls from farming communities in the midwest, girls from tiny private colleges, girls with husbands, girls with post-graduate degrees, girls from small jobs, big paying jobs, stressful jobs; now girls with babies. Girls from all over the place who found themselves — thanks to jobs or educations or husbands — in Tallahassee, Florida, a transient town where people come and go or somehow wind up staying forever.

It’s not easy, making grown-up friends. Schedules are packed to the brim. We don’t have slumber parties or stay up talking until all hours of the evening. We often go a couple of weeks without even seeing one another. There are husbands and boyfriends and babies and countless other small-seeming but big-feeling responsibilities.

But there is also less drama, more compromise. Fewer hurt feelings and better dinner parties.

I believe I met some of my lifelong friends in college.

But as the years pass and the distance grows, I wouldn’t be too surprised if these girls I met in the first months of my marriage, in the throes of beginning adulthood and graduate school and grocery shopping and apartment-dwelling, wound up being lifelong friends too.