The Benefits of Diverse Friendships
As I write this, I am on a camping trip with one of my closest friends and her family. I am so looking forward to the three-day weekend with these precious friends, despite the forecast of lots of rain.
Unlikely Friends
I first met this friend at a previous church. While I immediately liked her, in many ways we were the most unlikely of friends. While we share the same first name, we are quite different. She is a deep and emotional feeler. I am not. She is short and tiny. I am not. Her theological background is completely different from mine, and her life experience is significantly different.
I wonder if we would have ever invested in our friendship if God hadn’t put us together in such a way that we didn’t have a choice. She and her family turned out to be the first and really only committed family to be a part of our core team for our church plant we started in 2015. We were a small plant out of our house, so we didn’t have a large core team.
I don’t remember a lot of details of those early days in our friendship, but I can assuredly say now that I am so grateful God put us together. She has been a rock for me, there from the day we started to the church to the day we closed it in December 2020. She’s there now as we invest in a new church together with our families.
Diversity in Friendships
As I’ve grown in my faith, it has become abundantly clear that we do a disservice to ourselves and to our growth if our friends are only people who feel comfortable and similar to us. It’s so much simpler, but we miss out on diversity of points of view and diversity of backgrounds if we spend our time only with those who are a lot like us.
Investing in diverse friendships involves intentionality and work. It means hanging out in different places with different people than you might be comfortable with in order to meet new people. This can look different for everyone, but if your comfy people are the ones on the soccer field with you, you might need to hang out with the people at your local community center, too. It might mean visiting a church in a different part of town.
From there, intentionality and risk of rejection are required in order to get to know your potential new friends. Naturally, sometimes they just aren’t interested. Sometimes, the two of you really may not mesh, and a friendship doesn’t make sense. But often, if we meet others with a view of recognizing them as having been made in God’s image, God will spark a seed of friendship that the two of you can nurture and grow.
Benefits of Diverse Friends
There are endless benefits to having diversity in friendships. Simply having different life experiences can be so beneficial in helping us to see situations in different ways. There have been countless times when my friends have helped me see a situation from a different angle that creates room for more grace within me.
Racial diversity can be enormously helpful in our friendships as well. For white people, it helps us understand the struggle of those who are in minority or marginalized races. It creates an understanding that is difficult to achieve outside of the bounds of a close relationship.
Diversity of friendships can also loosen the reins of judgment in our hearts. I’ve found that the sooner I can put a name and a face to something I feel judgmental about, the quicker I can extend grace on the topic. Let’s consider the topic of adultery within a marriage. Most of us can agree that adultery is wrong and sinful.
Have you ever been friends with someone who committed adultery? I remember well making a pretty judgy comment related to adultery to a friend early on in our relationship. I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember how kindly she responded as she told me the story of how she was in a very challenging marriage and how she had made the mistake of adultery.
While of course, my friend knew her action were wrong, her bravery in sharing them with me caused me to think about that sin differently ever since. It’s easy to consider only how hurtful and wrong it is to the wronged spouse. But there is hurt and often regret to consider for the offender as well. The more we can put real faces and names to the things we think are wrong, the more grace and understanding we can extend.
Final Thoughts
Friendship in general may be hard for you. If it is, my heart goes out to you. I pray God will meet your heart’s desire to build solid and lasting friendships in your life. I’d venture to guess there are few of us who would say that we have exactly the complement of friends we’d like. While I am blessed with amazing friends, I haven’t achieved the full diversity of friends I’ve described above and am continuing to exert effort in this area. Friendship is a journey, but I pray we can all take steps together to seek God on how he might want to broaden the voices that speak into our lives.
is a Jesus follower, wife, mom of three, finance director, and lover of sarcasm and deep conversations with friends. She also loves camping, rafting, skiing, sewing, and hosting others in her home.
Photograph © Annie Theby, used with permission
