Sometimes I forget where I came from. I don’t mean that I lose track of where my house is or that I used to live in Maryland, but that I forget who I used to be and how things in my life have formed who I am today.
I think a lot of this is attributed to the fact that I rarely interact with elements of my past, especially old friends. Over the years I’ve known many people and have called many people my friend, yet of those, I only still keep in touch with a handful.
In high school, I had a group of close friends that always did things together and shared a lot of experiences and life together, as friends should. As I entered college, many of us ended up at the same school and continued our friendship as if nothing changed and we faced the new college experiences together.
Then I found church, and that changed my life. I won’t get into the details, but basically I ended up losing touch with my old friends as they were replaced by my ‘christian’ friends. I feel guilty for making the choice to drop out of the loop of my high school friends, but at the time I thought that I was doing what pleased ‘god’.
And so I made new friends through church, and they became good friends, as we struggled through learning how to be in a church that tried to mold us into workers for christ. They became my closest confidants in things in and out of church. It’s here that my roots still remain and haven’t been completely cut off. I’ll explain that a little later.
As I left college, so of my friends in church didn’t remain in church and thus left my life for good I thought. Some remained and we faced post-college life and church together. I made a few new friends in church as I moved into being a regular member of church and not just considered a student.
As few years went by and then the bottom dropped out. I left the church due to some unfortunate circumstances. This meant that I left behind the friends I made in church, which realizing now, were not real friends in any sense of the word. This is when I found my true friends again.
The ones that I had left behind in college who didn’t stay in church accepted me again, and we picked up as if no time had passed. We had grown up, but we were still the good friends and confidants that we were in college, struggling to understand an organization that had been brainwashing us and controlling our lives and relationships. This is when I found that my roots hadn’t been completely destroyed, and this is as deep as they go.
So now, as I continue living with my old friends under new context, it’s evident that the church only allowed us to meet, but we became friends on our own, and I’m grateful that this truth of our relationship has survived despite my mistakes.
These are my roots that I cannot forget. Sometimes it means taking a bus for hours to see them, or just a phone call to reconnect. They remind me of who I used to be and I can compare that to who I am now. I think that it’s vital to my own development and pursuit of purpose to see where I’ve come from in order to understand where I am going. My life may be a string of random decicions and events, but it is going somewhere nonetheless.
So here’s my advice, if you find people who will stick with you and accept you under your worst and best times, under good and bad circumstances, through your worst mistakes as well as your greatest triumphs, through time and distance, then call these your friends, and hold them closer than anything else in the world.
