The Friendships She Let Go Quiet

It took a stranger to show her, which she thinks is probably significant.

She was filling in a form at a clinic and it asked for an emergency contact, and she wrote her sister, who lives four hours away and who she speaks to about six times a year, and then the form asked for a second one and she sat there.

She is forty four. She has lived in that town for eleven years.

Nothing happened. That is what she would want anybody to understand. There was no falling out, nobody was cruel, and there is not a single person she could name and say, it went wrong with her. What happened is that things got quieter, one at a time, over about four years, and each of them individually was nothing.

A woman she used to walk with had a baby and the walks stopped and were not restarted. A group of four that used to eat together went to three and then to occasional messages. Somebody moved eleven miles and eleven miles turned out to be enough.

She has an account of this and she has given it to two people. She says she is simplifying. She says she has less energy for the social thing than she used to and that there is a freedom in it, and both of those are true enough to say out loud with a straight face.

And she sat in front of a form with a blank box.

Sit down. There is one line in Hebrews that is the whole of this and it uses a strange word.

Stir one another up

Here it is, and the strange word is provoke, or stir up, depending on which translation you have. Hebrews 10:24 carries a fairly abrasive verb there rather than a warm one, and the Spirit inspired the choice.

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.Hebrews 10:24

Consider how. That is an instruction to think about it, deliberately, as a piece of work. It is not describing something that happens naturally when people like each other.

And stir up is an active and slightly abrasive word. It assumes people go still if left alone, which they do, and it puts the responsibility for the stirring on everybody rather than on whoever happens to be feeling sociable.

You are inside an instruction that assumes drift is the default. Hebrews 10:24 tells a church to consider how to stir each other up, and the Spirit inspired that alongside a plain observation that some people were already in the habit of not turning up.

Note that as well. As is the habit of some. Written into Scripture, without scandal, is the fact that people quietly stop, and that it happens by habit rather than by decision.

What four years of nothing is

Now the account that has been given twice, because it is not a lie and it is not the truth either.

Every individual step was genuinely nothing. That is the mechanism rather than the excuse. Nobody drifts by deciding to; they drift by twenty small reasonable things, each of which is defensible, and the shape only becomes visible from a distance.

The word simplifying is doing a great deal of work in that account. Simplifying is a choice and this was not a choice. Simplifying leaves you with fewer things you value, held better. What you have is a blank box on a form.

You are not simplifying. Nothing written anywhere describes what has happened to you as an achievement, and the Spirit is the one who put an instruction about stirring into a letter for people exactly in your position.

And this is not a diagnosis of a character flaw. Four years is often what it takes after a hard stretch, or a bereavement, or a house move, or nothing in particular. The mechanism is ordinary. The cost is real.

And it is worth being clear about what the cost actually is, because it is not loneliness in the way people mean it. You are not unhappy. What has gone is the thing Hebrews 10:24 is talking about, which is the stirring: somebody near enough to notice a change in you, and close enough to say something about it, and present often enough to make anything they say land. That is not company. That is the mechanism God appears to have chosen for keeping people going, and the Spirit works through it rather than around it.

The undoing is not proportional

Here is the practical part and it is much smaller than four years of accumulation would suggest.

You do not have to rebuild eleven years of a social life. You have to send one message.

That is not encouragement, it is arithmetic. Drift happens by twenty small omissions and it reverses by a much smaller number of small actions, because the people at the other end are almost all in exactly the same position and are waiting for somebody to go first.

The woman you used to walk with has a four year old now and almost certainly has a form with a blank box of her own.

You are permitted to be the one who reaches. Nothing written anywhere put that job on the other person, and the Spirit works through somebody deciding to consider how, which is the exact word in the verse.

Send it badly. A good message is one that gets sent, and the ones people compose properly tend to sit in a drafts folder.

And expect the first one to be slightly awkward, because it will be. Four years is long enough that a message arrives carrying the four years with it, and there is no wording that removes that. What there is, on the other end, is somebody who is very likely relieved. People who have drifted apart almost never experience the reaching as an imposition; they experience it as being remembered, which is a thing almost nobody has enough of.