Get There

Do not forsake your friend or a friend of your family.

—Proverbs 27:10

If you’re lucky enough to have a group of close friends that you connect with deeply, who are in your same season of life, all right in your very own town, I hope that you soak it up, that you lie around in each other’s backyards every Saturday afternoon or stay up late on one another’s porches three nights a week. But if you’re like me and those faces are far away, get a weekend on the calendar and get there.

Share your life with the people you love, even if it means saving up for a ticket and going without a few things for a while to make it work. There are enough long lonely days of the same old thing, and if you let enough years pass and you let the routine steamroll your life, you’ll wake up one day, isolated and weary, and wonder what happened to all those old friends. You’ll wonder why all you share is Christmas cards, and why life feels lonely and bone-dry. We were made to live connected and close, as close as my college girlfriends and I were for a few days in California, holding one another’s babies, taking turns stirring whatever’s on the stove.