The Friendship Recipe

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Recipes are not my thing. They are too bossy, and I’m allergic to measuring. I’m more of a “throw the essential ingredients together and see how it goes” kind of girl, and it often bombs (please ask my husband about the “Chicken Cheese Biscuit Casserole” that I invented as a newlywed that he did not even pretend to like). However, unfortunately for Husband and all who enter my kitchen, my attempts work out just often enough for me to probably never change my ways.

And though I don’t pay close attention to food, I have always paid close attention to relationships, and fortunately, friendships are a lot like my brand of cooking. There’s no guaranteed way to ensure a successful friendship, but if you throw the essential ingredients in, you’ve got a pretty good shot.

Here’s Chef Carol’s recipe for friendships:

  • Bravery: Remember that feeling of stepping into the middle school lunchroom? Complete terror. Funny enough, pursuing friendships as an adult can jolt us right back there, to the cackle of the popular crowd, the texture of the curiously square pizza, and the crinkle of brown paper bags. So in your courageous pursuit of friendship, armor up—not with coolness or pride or aloofness or an intimidating outfit, but with identity. You are already loved, and you already belong. Your lovable-ness and your belonging are not ever in question, not for a moment, not even if it feels that way. Brené Brown says, “You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging,” and we see similar themes throughout the gospel: An imperfect people, inevitably struggling with sin, yet wholly loved and invited to God’s family. When you know and follow the Lord, you can wrap your Father's name around you like a blanket and step forward in bravery. Make the call. Send the message. Sit down at the table.
  • Sticky Conversation: To lay a foundation and build upon a foundation of friendship, you need sticky conversation—the kind of communication that gets everyone a little messy (a.k.a. both parties aren’t pretending to be perfect or that we know it all) and stays with you for a while. Really, this just means talking to connect rather than impress, over and over again. So you need to stay in touch, in whatever way best serves your current life. Email, texting, weekly phone calls, monthly coffee dates—find something your life allows you to stick with, and then stick with it. Voxer is a walkie-talkie app, and for many people, it’s the easiest way to connect in a disconnected society, particularly if you’re mom-ing it like me and you have a hard time completing a text. On Voxer, you just hit a button and talk about whatever you want—your kids aren’t sleeping, you don't know how to sort through an argument you had with your husband, you fell down in the Kroger parking lot, you love mint chocolate chip ice cream. Your friend listens and responds whenever she has time, whether that’s a minute later or four days later, and she can do so easily while she’s folding laundry, on her lunch break, or on a walk. It’s hands-free, noncommittal conversation, and strangely enough, it’s been the soil for some of my richest conversations and actual, effective discipleship has occurred between people in different countries and states.
  • Benefit of the Doubt: For friendships to thrive, we heap this generously and then add one more spoonful. I make it a practice to choose not to be offended as often as possible, and I am best able to be healthily honest about my own offensiveness when my friends extend this same grace. Otherwise we leave our conversations second-guessing everything: “Did that come across the wrong way?” On a recent Focus on the Family broadcast, Lysa TerKeurst shared how she combats this self-sabotage in friendships:

“I'll walk away from a conversation with a friend and I'll think, oh, you sounded so dumb when you said that...all this negative inside chatter. So, I recognize that if I was doing it, maybe some of my friends were having this after having conversations with me. And so, I called a friend one time after having lunch with her and I said, ‘Hey, I just want you to know, when you walk away from a conversation with us, you don't need to be held captive by any negative inside chatter, because all I'm thinking about right now is how awesome you are, how much I love you and I'm not psychoanalyzing anything you said or judging you for anything you did.’ And she said, ‘Oh, I feel so relieved!'...what a gift, you know; we need to give that to each other.” 

  • Resilience: For friendships to endure the inevitable changes life brings, we need to be resilient to awkwardness and conflict. To chase after peace vigorously, even if it means climbing over a weird conversation and pulling one other to the opposite side. Sometimes chasing after peace means being honest about your own baggage and sin and wrestling through it with the Lord, implementing change in the way you interact with your friend. Other times it means speaking what is strange between you two that it can lose its power. As you walk with the Holy Spirit, you are more able to discern when to resiliently work through conflict within your own soul and when to resiliently work through conflict together.
  • Fun: Relax, dude. This is supposed to be fun. Act stupid, laugh hard, eat guacamole, do not ask for forgiveness for your personality—that’s a gift to your friend, and we should save apologies for actual offenses.

I mean, ya know. Mix it all in and cook on 350 for forever. It doesn’t get sweet right away because these things take time, and we have to learn to trust one another. If you’ve added in all the ingredients, and it still sends the oven up in flames, don’t be discouraged. Start again with a new friend, go slower, and double-down on the bravery. Pray, like I have done many times, a prayer that feels so silly: “Dear God, please give me a friend,” and watch Him provide just the right person at just the right time.