Marinated Friendships

Much interaction occurs in this day and age, but are we really corresponding? Are we really communicating? Email, Twitter, Face Book, Instant Messaging, Texting - etc. - all ways to instantly stay in close contact. You can twitter the world at large that you are eating broccoli, ironing a shirt, trimming your toenails, studying for a test, or petting your cat - and said world is very moved and stimulated. So we must think, because millions of such messages flood the wires and our email accounts and we flatter ourselves that we have ‘communicated.’ Really connected. Stayed. In. Touch.

But is this real communication? Have we really made a soul connection? Touched each other’s lives in a meaningful way? Encouraged each other in the midst of life and its upheavals and challenges? Is this correspondence time invested with a rich result?

We are reduced to correspondence in our relationships due to the fact that we are such a mobile society that today’s dear friend is tomorrows long-distance friend and next years distant memory. Our lives fill with dissolved, abandoned, and discarded friendships like so much dead wood stacked in the recesses of our minds and hearts.

We’ve lost the skill and time commitment and energy that is required to slowly marinate a friendship in meaningful, time-investing ways. The phrase ‘stay-in-touch’ implies a meaningful heart-to-heart sort of connection. But to maintain this requires time and special care, and it is just as much true for friends in close proximity as it is for long-distance friendships. We cannot afford to get sluggish or slothful with the meaningful efforts needed to maintain a relationship.

To stay in touch, you must see it as your personal responsibility. You cannot rely on the other to do the hard work of correspondence while you sit back in indolent ease. You must make the effort, or believe me, this friendship will die on the vine even full of the ripe fruit of possibility for a long-lasting bountiful and blessed friendship. Because people take love and care. They need nurturing. Negligence does not a beautiful friendship make. Negligence does not a beautiful friendship keep.