Finding Real Friends

Apparently I put on a good enough show for people to like me and think I was fun, but I was always so guarded that people assumed I didn't want to get to know them

Story Tags

aprroval, relationships, identity, high school, depression, drinking

Explore the Story

• Craving Acceptance
• Twists and Turns
• Finding True Love
• Identity Crisis
• The Hole in Our Heart
• Where's God in suffering?

My story starts at what was the hardest time in my life; high school. The problem was that I had no "real" friends. I spent my weekend nights at home with my parents. No one ever invited me out because people just didn't think of me or when they did they thought I would be out with someone else. Apparently I put on a good enough show for people to like me and think I was fun, but I was always so guarded that people assumed I didn't want to get to know them. My unwillingness to let people get to know me beyond the specific image that I allowed to be seen drove people away, and left me wondering why.

Because of this, I grew more desprate for attention outwardly and more depressed inwardly. I would pray at night to a God I didn't really know asking for a group of friends who I could identify as my own. For a while it didn't come. I continued to be the out going attention seeker on the outside, while falling apart on the inside.

I finally joined a group of friends my junior year who I was somewhat able to identify with. It was great at first, but I quickly began to mold my morals to theirs. Within about six months of involvement with this group I found myself drinking regularly and finding my meaning in how much fun I was at a given party. I found that being part of this group had answered my desire for friends, but failed to hit the true problem. These friends I had found enjoyed my humor and enjoyed sharing a beer, but cared nothing for who I was. I found that my inablity to share my life, my passions, and my pains with these friends left me even more empty than I had been before. There were times when I greatly questioned my own worth, and whether I would ever find these meaningful friendships I sought.

Had I contunined on the track I was following I would have quickly begun to replace my hopes for meaningful friendships with drinking and partying, choosing to forget my loniness rather than face it. This was the direction those friends ended up following and Im sure I would have willingly followed.

My stituation quickly improved as I graduated high school and began my freshman year of college. With my friends away at school hours away and myself stuck at community college back home I once again found myself alone. With no where else to turn for friends I was finally forced to bring together two parts of my life I had always kept separate; my spiritual life and my social life. I began to seek friendships in my church, younglife, and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I found myself developing relationships that taught me that my faith in Christ didn't need to be separate from my social life, and for the first time I saw Christianity as fun. That wasn't the only first that year. I also established friendships with a group of guys who were both fun to be around, and more importantly truely cared about one another and the lives we were leading.

Through my freshman year I learned that true, meaningful Christian community has the potential to be exteremly fun and incredibly liberating. Before that point in my life I had yet to experience either to the scope that I had now found. My sophomore year I left home and transfered to Virginia Tech. After spending a semester trying out different groups I found myself spending more and more time with other students involved in Campus Crusade. I was cautious at first not believing that God could really set me up with as good of a community as I had found the year before. But once I invested myself I found a community even larger and more loving than I had ever experienced.

My time at tech with crusade has been great. Like all communtiies we falter and stumble every now and then, but in all we remain a group of people willing to invest in each others lives. Through time and growth I came to realize that such a community has the potential to exist between all who have a relationship with Jesus all we must do is trust that it is possible.