The Redeemer of Broken Things
I didn’t have a single friend until my freshman year of high school.
As an adult, this feels shocking to me. I have many close friends now, but I used to believe I would never get there. When you’re thirteen and friendless, the years stretching before you feel empty and even more isolating.
Most of this wasn’t my fault. I desperately wanted friends, but my childhood was volatile. By the time I left for college, I had attended thirteen schools. My mother was unstable and couldn’t hold a job. Whenever she exhausted all the goodwill from a boss or landlord, it was time to pack up and move again.
Sometimes we stayed in one place for a year, sometimes for just a few months. After years of this, I learned I wouldn’t have time to make friends before we moved again, so I stopped trying. Occasionally I checked out books from the library about being a good friend to figure out how I could get just one single friend, but it was too hard when I knew I’d just move again.
That changed when I moved in with my grandma and started high school in September 1997. I recognized a few faces from two of the middle schools I’d attended, but that was it. I didn’t know any names or have any phone numbers.
My first day, a girl in my first-period English class whose face was familiar sat down next to me and introduced herself. Her name was Rachel, and we had been in the same English class in seventh grade too. She remembered me. I hated that she knew who I was. Seventh grade Krista wore dirty, ratty clothes and didn’t bathe every day. Her stomach growled during class. Since she never knew how to react to the taunts of her classmates, she screamed at people in the hallways and stormed out of classrooms in frustration.
But Rachel didn’t seem to remember those things. She never once said a cruel thing to me, and a few weeks later, I was friends with her and her twin sister, Becca. At fourteen years of age, I had my first friends, and the numbers of friends I had increased when Rachel invited me to attend youth group at her church.
Rachel and Becca taught me all the things you need to know about being a friend that can’t be learned from a library book. They taught me about slumber parties, where we stayed up giggling and playing silly games until 2 a.m. They taught me the power of an inside joke and a common vernacular among friends. They taught me about sharing clothes and going to see movies and how to fight and resolve conflict.
Those friendships showed me three things: one, I loved having community; two, I could make friends; and three, I was a really good friend. I mean, a really, really good friend. I remembered birthdays and anniversaries and details like favorite colors and foods. I asked about important events and inquired after appointments. I knew the importance of asking about my friends’ families and pets. I assumed I did these things because I’d spent so much time reading books about how good friends behave.
Not until I was an adult did I understand that God gives us certain qualities from the day we’re born that aren’t dependent on our childhoods or library history. In grad school, I took the Clifton Strengthsfinder assessment for the first time. I’ve taken it two more times since then, and each time my number one strength is WOO: Winning Others Over.
Having WOO means I care about people and relationships. It means I inherently know how to make people feel heard and special. WOO is what helps me create connections. Some days, my WOO is what makes me look back and see that God knew I was going to struggle for a while in the friend arena, but he was going to redeem that pain and loss. It’s my anchor to a God who is good, even when we cannot see his goodness through our pain.
God is a redeemer of broken things. He repairs them, making them stronger and better than they could ever have been on their own.
I have a tight circle of friends these days. Many of them are the same women I became friends with at fourteen. I often find myself the only one in a group who talks about her childhood friends because I’m the only one who has them; everyone else has drifted away from those friends. But personally, I believe you should hold tight to your friends. They’re a gift from God, whether you have one or many, whether you’ve known them one year or twenty.
Whatever your brokenness is, you can rest assured that God has the ability to repair it, just as he did mine.
is a new transplant to the Austin area, after spending nearly her whole life in Southern California. She is a case manager at Austin Angels. Krista loves bright colors, dogs, reading, cross stitching, and making new friends. Her first book, Four Letter Words, is available on Amazon.
Photograph © Melissa Askew, used with permission
