Your Friendships are for a moment, not "forever"

One of the most dominant aspects of my life over the past four years in college is something that completely blindsided me. Friendships are so incredibly temporary.

Now, in high school, I was not a very great friend. I knew that very few people stay in touch with their friends from high school. I also wanted to get as far out of the little town that I grew up in as I could, and I was okay with completely severing ties with the people there. I realized that the thing that drew my friends and me together the most was the fact that we, coincidentally, went to the same high school. That realization led me to be a pretty mediocre friend at best.

College was totally different. I love Omaha and am going to miss the city and people with all of my heart. I forged friendships that I honestly believe are going to last me my whole life. I really threw myself into some of these relationships, hoping to set the foundation for something that would last forever.

This relational aspect certainly didn't disappear in my residencies with churches either. I dove into the communities in these churches hoping to build relationships that I could continue to foster for many years to come. And then, every year my residency would come to a close and I would be encouraged to be a resident at another church. For professional reasons, this is a great idea, but relationally, it's not awesome. I would get to know these incredible people and then inevitably I would have to leave them in May, and I would probably never talk to most of them again.

After about the second or third trip through the rotating door of relationships in churches, I vented to my mentor. I was so tired of goodbyes and losing relationships that really were beginning to matter to me. He told me something that I hope will stick with me for a long time:

“People will always come and go in your life, very few relationships will actually last forever. As pastors, as people, we simply care for the people that are in our lives at the moment and love them like Jesus does. When they leave, we find the other people who are in our lives and love them.”

So, to everyone graduating, you won't maintain all of these relationships, don't kill yourself trying to. To the person moving out of town, don't hold so tightly onto every relationship you had. Your friends will come and go, and the fact that those relationships are temporary can be seen in one of two ways. You can see them as unimportant and you can choose to not invest in them. Or, and this is the one I recommend, the fact that they are temporary can be seen as beautiful and you can invest in, and love, the relationship. Moving forward, that’s what I will choose to do. I challenge you to do the same.

#Friendship #college #life