Chapter Nine
Building Close Friendships and Working Hard
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
Frederick Buechner, Now and Then
Friendships and work need our utmost attention in our conversations with the next generation. I would argue that it’s in these two places where they experience a lot of private misery.
Whenever I’m talking with young women, they want to know how to have closer relationships and how to have meaningful and balanced work lives. Many say they are unhappy with the quality of their friendships and with the work they are doing. They ask me about my work-ministry history and how it evolved into what I’m doing today. They want something different, but they are unsure about how to get there.
I always begin my conversations about these issues with this question: “How do you want to live?” As we discuss this question, I ask other questions, such as:
The answers I hear tell me if they are listening to their lives. Are they making choices that line up with what they say they want in these areas? Or are they saying they want one thing (such as closer friendships) but then making choices (such as working sixty hours a week and communicating with their friends only via social media) that preclude them from experiencing what they want? I’ve found that if I want to help younger women choose life, I must show them and talk with them about how our choices impact the way we live.
If you’ve listened to your life and made deliberate choices that line up with what you value and want, then you are positioned to talk about what you have learned and how you have lived your life. Be willing to speak about the strength you’ve gained from close friendships and the satisfaction you’ve received through your vocation, whether inside or outside the home.
Developing Close Friendships
When I was twelve years old, I kept a journal with a list of all my closest friends. Beside each name I would draw a portrait of the person and then write words describing what I loved about him or her. As I grew up, my need for friendship didn’t change, but I began overfilling my schedule. I wasn’t mature enough to ask myself, “How do I want to live?” My life became fragmented, and many of my relationships were superficial. I wasn’t listening to my life or trying to find God in everything I did.
Looking back, I can see that while I loved people and knew how to relate to a variety of personalities, I did not make close friendships a priority. Yes, I had many friends, but in my heart I knew something was missing: I lacked deep friendships.
I was in my early twenties when I met a woman who modeled for me what it looks like to make friendship a priority. I witnessed it in LeAnne Lau, my mother-in-law, a woman who was fully alive, fully human, and yet confidently knew her design as a friend to others. The more she nurtured me in the art of real friendship, telling me with her life, You have a friend in me, the more I realized I wasn’t living the way I wanted to and that I needed to make different choices.
Because a large part of my conversations with young women involves sharing stories from my own life, I often tell them about LeAnne and what I learned from her about what it means to be a friend.
For the first two years of our marriage, Brad and I lived in Colorado near my in-laws. Once or twice a month, we’d drive south on I-25 from Fort Collins for an hour and a half before starting to climb the base of the Rocky Mountains in Evergreen. An hour later, we were breathing beautiful, crisp mountain air where their family home sat on the edge of a cliff overlooking the city. Our weekends spent at Brad’s parents’ house were filled with games, eating, and just hanging out.
Jerry and LeAnne both taught Bible classes and Sunday school classes with no fewer than one hundred participants. Looking on the outside of their busy lives, many would speculate that their friendships were shallow or that they didn’t have time to make relationships a priority. But as a woman who knew the value of friendship, LeAnne didn’t let her schedule come before her close friends. I witnessed firsthand how she put first things first in her life every day. She always told me, “Staying close to women is a choice.”
Not a weekend passed without several of LeAnne’s friends either stopping by or calling on the phone to visit briefly. When I walked into the kitchen while she was on the phone, I often overheard her say, “It’s always so good to talk to you. You are [insert encouraging word about that person]. Brad and Pam are here for the weekend, but let’s talk again soon.” The women in LeAnne’s life knew they could depend on her for an encouraging word, a listening ear, or when necessary, a longer conversation.
For LeAnne, prioritizing friendships among her community was the very air she breathed—even when she worked full-time. For eighteen years, my mother-in-law taught communication courses around the country for businesses and government agencies. For twenty years before that, she served as a discussion leader, a teaching leader, and finally an area administrator for Bible Study Fellowship. She was connected to hundreds of women weekly.
She learned early on that without the closeness of women friends, life is lonely, empty, and ultimately self-centered. She did everything to let women know they mattered to her—she wrote cards, made new friends, got involved in her local church, and called her friends on the phone just to check in. Yet in her pursuit of friendship, what made LeAnne stand above the rest in the world of women was that she never felt frazzled. Her love for people did not weary or exhaust her.
As we talked over lunch one afternoon, I asked her about her closest friends. Her eyes sparkled as she described Heidi, Diana, Bev, and Ginger. She listed five more names and then added another three. I knew several of these women and said, “Mom, none of those women are anything like you.”
“We have one God in common and he’s taught me how to pray for, speak the truth to, and encourage every woman in my life.”
Not completely convinced of her approach, I asked her one last question: “How on earth do you find the time for all of these close friendships?”
Placing the white porcelain coffee mug on the table and looking me straight in the eye, she said, “Pam, you and I make choices every day, and prioritizing relationships is a choice to initiate, to be genuinely interested, to be transparent, and to learn to listen.”
Her words helped me realize that if I wanted deeper relationships, I had to make space. I decided to back off from a hideously driven life and to slow down. I couldn’t have close friendships unless I made time to listen to my friends and be present to them.
My conversations with LeAnne also helped me identify some guiding principles about how to form deeper bonds. These three stand out above the rest:
1. It’s not about you. Jesus taught that there’s no greater love than to lay down our lives for our friends (John 15:13). When we give up what pleases us to be with a friend or when we set aside time to develop a friendship, we are focused on what we can give to our friend. The invitation to “lay down” our lives for our friends is not a call for us to be people pleasers or to love people more than we love God. When we do these things, our love is self-centered because we are making the relationship all about meeting our own needs. God’s path to friendship takes us on a higher road. I understand this when I choose to lay aside my time, my energy, or my to-do list in order to spend time with my friends. However, I find that the more I pray for my friends, the less likely I am to try to fix them or impose on them my own ideas about how they should be living their lives. As I pray for them deeply from my heart, God shows me what they need rather than what I think they want or need.
Recently, my friend Lisa and I couldn’t get our schedules to work out so we could get together. This was unusual for us as we try to see each other every day. As my disappointment grew, I started to take the situation personally. I stopped myself as I realized my schedule was a problem too. I then prayed for Lisa and was led to drop off flowers on her porch and to wait patiently until we could find another time to connect. When we did finally see each other, Lisa explained the complications on her end. Following God’s ways in friendship means praying to find out what our friends need. This turns our selfishness into serving.
2. It’s better to outgive. My mother-in-law made the women in her sphere of influence feel like God’s most unique creations on their birthdays. She was always sending birthday cards, and each card contained a note written specifically for that friend, based on how LeAnne saw God’s design of that one person. LeAnne would list the friend’s qualities, noting the impact the person made on her. She would often tell me, “I like to tell the truths that belong to that one person.”
Once when talking about a younger colleague, LeAnne said how difficult it was to love her. “Frankly, she’s just self-centered. But when I pray for her, I ask God to show me the truth of who she is—what good qualities belong to her. And that’s how I encourage her, even though she can be difficult to love.” If we’re preoccupied with what we receive from a friendship, we are bringing a consumer mind-set into something that money cannot buy. God wants us to give.
3. If you want deeper friendships, sometimes you have to take the initiative. I discovered this fourteen years ago when I first moved to the West Coast and met Marcile. We met after she had lost her first husband to a plane crash and married her second husband, Bob. She was sixty-four years old. Marcile had a lot of family members around her, including her eighty-eight-year-old mother, three married children, eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. She was the matriarch and didn’t indicate she needed any more friends, but we made an instant connection at gatherings, concerts, and celebrations.
I had a deep conviction to meet with Marcile more regularly. It wasn’t because she and I had so much in common; our lives didn’t reflect each other in any way. But there was something very present about Marcile that I knew God wanted me to witness up close and personal. I had to force myself to ask her to spend time with me at first. But finally I told her I thought she had something to offer me and I wanted to learn from her. We’ve met on and off for several years.
And I did learn from her. I grew, actually. It wasn’t just the Bible studies we did, the books we read, or the prayers we prayed—although Marcile could exegete passages as well as any scholar I’ve heard. But stepping into her home, just being in her presence, calmed me. It was good for me to set aside my frantic routine of working and driving carpool and to still myself by the window in her room while she sat by me. She was always at peace, and she always wanted to tell me something about her life or herself. I discovered what women so often do in relationships like this one: I sought out the friendship for my sake but kept going for friendship’s sake. I met with Marcile because I needed a mentor and ended up becoming her friend. I developed a love for her that runs deep.
When Bob, her husband, died last year, Marcile had to sell their sweet cottage of a home and move into a retirement center. She called me one day and asked if I could come pray with her. As I stood in her doorway, preparing to feel her peaceful presence, I thought about our friendship: It was sweet and endearing. We could be in each other’s presence without saying any words. We never ended our time together until we knew the other was encouraged.
Pursuing a friendship with Marcile took courage on my part. I initiated it. If I hadn’t, our friendship wouldn’t exist. And not only would I have missed out on the privilege of knowing her, but I also would have let pass an opportunity of a lifetime to be a real friend to her. My friendship with Marcile allowed me to pray for more love for her, and God gave me truths that belonged to her—truths about her person that gave so much to me.
Working and Making Money
Along with questions about friendships, young women also ask me about my calling and work life. But what they are all trying to figure out is how their work will support and fit into the lifestyle they desire. Some women want a bigger house in the suburbs while others want little financial pressure so they can travel, serve overseas, or go back to school by living in a smaller home. And if a woman has kids, she may wonder, Should I cut back on my job or not?
This was the case for Haley. We began an ongoing conversation about work and making money one evening when a group of friends, including Haley and her husband, were having dinner with Brad and me. We were gathered around a large round table, enjoying lighthearted conversation as we caught up on our families, work projects, and trips. As our food arrived, Haley, who is ten years younger than me, asked, “Pam, how did you decide about making money and working? What informed your decisions?” Haley wanted to talk with a woman who understood the tensions between a woman’s working life and her personal life.
One year earlier, Haley and her husband decided they wanted to buy a larger home to accommodate their growing family. His salary was slowly but nicely increasing, which helped support Haley in her artistic pursuits as a freelance photographer. At that time, they could afford their lifestyle and Haley was free to be the primary caretaker of their children. However, they had just found their dream home and were trying to decide what would need to happen for them to be able to afford it. Haley had just realized that she wanted the good life—a life in which she could pursue her passions as a photographer, stay involved with her family, and provide an income to help pay for a bigger home.
This understanding caused her to try to figure out what she could do to make more money. It was forcing her to answer some other critical questions: Do I want to become an employee so that we can live in our dream home? Am I willing to take just any job? How many hours am I willing to work—hours away from my kids? Can I handle the stresses that will come as a result of making this kind of change? If I do get a job, how will it change my calling as a photographer?
Haley wanted to know if my journey had been similar and how I had navigated it.
My single friend Andrea faced a different dilemma: She made plenty of money as a speech therapist but after three years had started to feel miserable and knew she needed to listen to her voice, her vocation, leading her to other work. Before she could just leave a secure job and paycheck, Andrea had to answer some hard questions. On a walk one autumn afternoon, I asked, “What’s driving your decision to change jobs?” She answered, “It makes no sense, right? Everyone tells me I have the perfect job. But I’m not happy. I want to live with more free time and not be thinking about my job twenty-four-seven.” And then she asked me, “How did you know how to say yes to what you’re doing now?” Both Haley and Andrea saw that I was doing work I loved, and they wanted to know how I had accomplished that because they wanted to do something similar.
What Haley and Andrea weren’t prepared for me to say was that getting to the point where I could make a living following my passion wasn’t as easy as it might look and that I didn’t have a formula or specific answers. In the many conversations I had with both of them about this topic, I told them that what I could do was paint them a picture of my working life, my personal life, and the tensions between making money and pursuing my passions. I could tell them about my successes and also my failures—I certainly had made mistakes along the way, including working too little and taking the wrong job before I found my sweet spot, the place where I operate with the most energy. Both had taught me a lot about how I wanted to live.
Talking about vocation and calling in light of all we are discussing in this book is critical: young women are fearful of the future and can feel riddled with comparison of how others are living their lives. If I’m honest, comparing myself with another woman’s calling could be the death of me if I’m not listening to the voice of God every single day.
Finding the courage to obey God when it came to my vocation was and is complicated; it’s rooted in my sufferings, my friendships, my children, my pleasures, and my talents. Time after time God spoke to the heart of my vocational questions and said, “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of herself more highly than she ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.”1 There’s not much else that causes women more guilt and misery than the comparisons and judgments we make about our or others’ working lives. God is so much bigger than the small issues we’ve made of it all.
So in answer to Haley’s and Andrea’s questions, I decided to stick to the basics. I told them a few of the lessons I’d learned in my working life to give them a picture of what I had done that had allowed me to get to this point. I share a few of them here so that you can do something similar in your own conversations with the young women in your life.
The Value of Getting a Varied Experience
In high school and college, I took any job I could get to help pay for gas and also to help pay for my college tuition. Working in various positions, especially with the public, gave me diverse experiences and helped me clarify what I wanted to do for work as an adult.
One day in May of 1990, my dad drove down to Lynchburg, Virginia, to help me pack up my college dorm room before driving me back home to New Jersey. Dad valued hard work and didn’t waste any time in finding out when I was going to get a job. I was thinking if I had a job by the end of the summer, I was doing pretty well. I was also pondering my applications for grad school when my dad asked me, “What are your plans to work?” I had just been offered an interview for a full-time job as the local advertising manager at a Gannett newspaper in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I knew it was an awesome opportunity to get experience, but I was torn because I also wanted to pursue other jobs or a graduate degree. What my dad understood then that I did not was that getting experience and working hard mattered more than getting the perfect job.
My dad made it clear that I needed to make money and pay my own way now that I had finished college. I wanted to go to grad school, but didn’t have the money to pay for it. So the next morning, I was able to arrange an interview, which led to a job offer for a position with a salary, full benefits, gas money, and a chance for promotion.
Because I took this job, I learned the value of earning my own money and I learned how to work hard. The month after I took the job, a fellow employee became very sick and had to leave his job in national sales. My boss offered me the job as the national advertising manager, which quickly increased my pay and my responsibilities. The job felt too big for me, but after weeks and months of long hours, stressful decisions, and learning new concepts, I began to realize that I was doing my best. And that felt good.
On top of that, I loved my job as national advertising manager. I met people from all over the East Coast, and it provided me with professional experience that would be recognized in the workplace. Having that job gave me a sense of autonomy and the satisfaction of supporting myself. Being able to pay my bills and have money to do what I wanted gave me a sense of great accomplishment and worth as a worker. These were God’s gifts to me in that season because exactly one year later, my decision to get married took me in a different direction.
When the women in my workplace heard I was getting married and leaving my position, they promptly told me I was making a big mistake after all I had invested in my job. My career, they insisted, was more important than a relationship with a man. This caused me some angst, and I told a few women from my church about it. They responded, “But doesn’t it feel good to not worry about working so hard anymore?” Both responses were offensive to me. I was tempted to stop sharing with the Christian women in my life and to stop listening to the women at my work. I knew that I didn’t want to put my work above everything else in my life. That was not how I wanted to live. But I also loved working and couldn’t imagine my life without it.
The Value of Doing Our Best
When Brad and I decided to attend graduate school in Colorado, I left my job in New Jersey, only to land in a city where professionals were waiting tables for a living. I had to force myself to apply for jobs at a temp agency. I wouldn’t have minded, but I had just left a great job and felt this was taking a step back. My first temp job was to sit at a front desk and answer the phone for a company that manufactured plastic parts. Every morning the boss showed me the flow chart of the organization, pointing with his large, fat finger at the bottom, where my name was. I lasted about two weeks. My second temp job for the local electric company wasn’t much better. I sat in a cubicle and took pictures of residents’ monthly electric bills and filed them. I did this for eight hours a day.
One day the general manager came to my cubicle and said, “Pam, I hear you want to write. How would you like to go out on assignment and write for our magazine? We will pay you hourly above and beyond your current job.” I learned a valuable lesson about making money and working: taking the temp jobs, doing work that didn’t fit with my passions, working wholeheartedly in a job when the boss asked me to do menial tasks like getting ice every morning for his Diet Coke were stepping-stones that gave me varied experiences and taught me to do my best, no matter the job. Even when I was writing articles on the rising costs of electricity, a topic I didn’t care about, I gained satisfaction from learning something new and doing my best.
The Value of a Meaningful Life
A few years later, I earned my graduate degree and accepted a full-time position as an English professor. After I had our third child, I had to decide whether to continue working, as the cost of full-time child care would significantly diminish my ability to add to the bottom line of our family income. Although my husband was a terrific and involved father, his career made it impossible for him to share in the child care. Again I had to ask myself, “How do I want to live?” I answered that question by deciding that the financial bottom line wasn’t as important as the little people who were being added to our family. I wanted to revolve my life around people differently; I was becoming more interested in a meaningful life, not money. I had to ask myself if I was willing to hire a nanny or find full-time child care. Could I handle the constant pressures of work and small children? What were the consequences of stepping out of my career this soon?
I decided, with Brad’s support, to leave my profession because I could not care for three babies and pay attention to my work at my fullest capacity. I tried it for a while, and all I could produce everywhere I went was frantic and anxious work. So I made a decision based on how I wanted to live and then made adjustments. Easy enough, right?
Wrong.
Living by Your Values Brings Challenges
The adjustments were painful. We sold our home in the suburbs and rented a shoe-box-sized townhouse near the college where Brad worked. It was an abrupt downsizing. On top of that, my decision to stop earning money felt like a choice to stop pursuing my vocation and to downsize our lifestyle. Even with good intentions of investing my time more in relationships, I had a hard time structuring my life without a “job.”
A year or so later we bought another home by cashing out my 401(k). As our family grew, so did our expenses and my desire to work again. What I wasn’t prepared for was how my capacity for making money had shifted. My lifestyle of having three small children and a husband with a high-profile job required everything of me. I was not capable of taking on full-time work, so I took a job that offered me quarter-time work and was eventually able to increase my hours to half-time, helping us reach our financial needs from month to month. For a few months, everything fell into place and it felt good to be in a better state financially. But I was starting to feel miserable. I was in my midthirties and no longer wanted to work just in order to pay the bills. That wasn’t enough for me anymore; I knew God was leading me through my dissatisfaction. But where was he leading me?
One thing became clear: I could not compare my working life with the working lives of other women. I waited for God to show me his divine plan for me. In that waiting time, I learned that every choice I made had consequences. But I wasn’t left on my own in making those choices if I was willing to listen and wait.
Once again I was faced with the question of how I wanted to live. Did I want to work to pay for our vacations and visits to our families? To have my girls attend private school? How important was making money to me? Or did I want a job that gave me the flexibility to work differently? I started to ask if I could work for myself. Did I have the discipline?
Over time I discovered my calling by noticing that people kept coming to me with the same questions and problems and by realizing that I had a burning desire to show them how God had helped me with those same questions. I saw many spiritual needs but couldn’t meet them unless I made some changes. This insight led me to make significant life choices about my vocation so I could have a job that was more in line with my calling. But honoring my true self while living within the confines of our financial reality was not easy.
When that first month came around and there wasn’t enough money to cover the school tuition, we transferred two of our girls to another school. They missed their friends, teachers, and the smaller school so much that they became unhappy. I knew I had to stick with my decision, so I worked even harder to earn money doing what I loved so I could help my girls go back to their school. Within five months, I had not quite enough work to be able to send them back, but the financial aid office at the school helped make up the difference. Staying true to my calling was never so hard as it was those few months, because the people I loved the most were sacrificing for my choices. But I learned how to let others step into my calling with me, sacrificing any notion that I was doing this on my own. And as things came back together, I felt more settled knowing I was living how God wanted too.
Share Your Own Stories
I struggled with writing this chapter because there’s no nice way to tie this all together and wrap it up beautifully. There are no cut-and-dried answers for us to give to the women behind us—but we do have our experiences.
After twenty-five years of working different jobs, I had the skills and the reputation to work on my own as a writer and speaker. What many younger women don’t have is the perspective of how much time and experience it takes before you are ready and able to make a decision like that.
If you’re honest about your own history, you may find you can identify with my story. Your perspective on friendships and work and what you’ve learned are stories younger women need to hear, even if you are still trying to figure things out yourself.
Perhaps you are working on building friendships. Ask yourself what happened in your life that made you aware of your desire for real friends. And if you have years of history with friends, ask yourself, What has made those friendships tick? What makes a good friend? Or maybe you’ve stopped making friendships a priority and you need to ask yourself why. Did you experience disappointment too many times? Do you believe women are just too difficult to love?
Ask yourself, How has God led in my decision to work or not to work for money? Have I accumulated more debt than I can pay off in a few months? Are profits or people more important to me? How do I know? Have I taken my calling seriously enough to move toward fulfilling it? If not, why?
Our goal is to encourage young women to take a step back and ask, What kind of life do I want to have and what kind of life does God want me to have? It’s important we know how we ourselves would answer those questions as we talk about our varied friendship and work experiences. And remember, in preparing how you would answer younger women, you are becoming a safe haven on relevant issues about which the church has remained relatively silent.