People, Answers, and Thoughts on Friendship

I will warn any readers ahead of time that I'm not sure how well this post will flow. One thought led to another, and it may not all fit together neatly in the end. But yesterday was an unexpectedly emotional day, and these are some things I feel the need to say.

It is always so interesting to me how Heavenly Father answers prayers. I’ve been feeling very disconnected lately, I already wrote about that, and have been realizing that I need to somehow make an effort to be among people. My problem, though, has been that I just don’t even know where to begin.

Yesterday morning, though, I remembered something that I learned last year, one of those lessons that I know but too frequently forget. As I read my scriptures, sitting on the porch on a beautiful, warm, dry, cloudless morning I remembered that when you pray to know who to reach out to, Heavenly Father will always answer that prayer, even though He often answers by sending us to someone we didn’t expect to be sent to, who is hard to reach out to, and acting on our answer often takes courage.

But the assurance of receiving an answer gave me confidence, and so when I prayed, I prayed not only to have help in connecting with other people, in finding people to be among, but also to know who I could reach out to, and to have the courage to do so.

I received my answer in sacrament meeting. As I expected, it was not the easiest answer for me to receive. I spent a good deal of time formulating a plan for how to make contact with the girl I felt I needed to talk to. And in the end, when I finally set out to do it after a day of planning, she wasn’t even home.

I am still not excused from this prompting. I will visit her later this week, or sometime soon. But what is interesting to me is that Heavenly Father did not just send me out on a fruitless errand, because my walk to their house put me in the path of two other people out walking that evening and I found myself walking and talking with them just for a short time, the few blocks back to our own houses. And in the course of that time I was able to remember that I am still loved by people who are not immediately within that core group of friends that has disappeared, and was able to confide in them, tell them unashamedly that I am feeling a little lonely right now, that I do need friends, to ask them to include me when they get together with people.

That was kind of a big deal for me. I am very hesitant to make an obvious effort to be included, partly because I’m a very independent person, but also partly because I’m sensitive about my loneliness. Even though I have been surrounded by good friends for years now, I can still remember a time in high school when I found myself drifting from my closest friend and had nowhere else to go. The pain of being alone was compounded by the pain of having other people see that I was alone, and to this day the last thing I want is for people to see me as a friendless person.

But even though that high school fear still hangs on so long after the fact, I have learned a lot in the meantime. I have learned, first and foremost, that I am not a friendless person, that people tend to like me when they know me. And I have learned that I am not the only one who sometimes feels alone, who sometimes feels that there is something missing, who sometimes loses friends to distance and marriage and time and change, and that it’s okay to admit that this happens to me.

Sometimes, I realized last night (with a little help from some counsel from my mom which, characteristically, I stubbornly refused to accept until hours afterwards when I realized that she was right after all), people don’t forget about you because they don’t love you. They just don’t realize that you need to be remembered. It’s easy for all of us to be caught up in our own world and assume that the people just outside of our world who appear to have things together are doing fine handling their own life.

Who have I overlooked because I thought they were doing fine on their own?

I think I will be okay this summer. I think I will have people to be with, although I will of course continue make an effort to seek out other people. And as usual, God has amazed me by answering a prayer (why am I always so surprised when He does?). It just took me thinking about other people first, and Heavenly Father took that and turned it into an answer to my own worries and loneliness.

That’s a good lesson for me to learn again.