Feast or Famine
by Jane Johnson Struck
What I’ve learned about the all-or-nothing nature of friendships

September 16, 2008 | I gently propelled the umbrella stroller cradling my little one over the bumps and cracks of my subdivision's sidewalk. Surveying the shuttered cookie-cutter houses and neat, empty yards surrounding me, my heart suddenly ached with acute loneliness.

A first-time mom who'd left the marketplace to stay home with her newborn, I felt adrift in suburbia—cut loose, by my own choice—from the relational world to which I'd once belonged, one filled with the laughter and shared confidences of coworkers and other career-absorbed friends.

Throughout days of burping and diapering and breastfeeding my baby, my isolation grew. While I loved caring for my tiny daughter, I became famished for female friendship. So I began to pray, “Lord, you know I don't make friends easily. Right now I feel shy and lonely and insecure. I desperately need some girlfriends in this unfamiliar season of life. Please, help me!�?/P>

Not long after—and quite unexpectedly—a new-mom neighbor named Patty initiated a get-together. With our babies nodding off in their infant seats, we guzzled strong coffee (to counteract our new-mom sleep deprivation) and gabbed about poop and colic and sore nipples. We laughed and kvetched and swapped childbirth “war stories.�?

This budding bond with Patty, an answer to my prayers, soon became the first in a feast of neighborhood girlfriends who nourished me for years. In this season of life, at least, my friendship famine was ending.

However, God doesn't always answer desperate prayers for friendships so readily, I've discovered. Sometimes I stay hungry for a season (or two), quelling the companionship pangs that seize my starving heart. And when the “green pastures�?of Psalm 23 seem so faraway, I question why God doesn't lead me to the girlfriends I need to feed my soul right now.

I've learned lessons in lean times, to be sure. A deeper dependence on God's goodness and care. Unexpected satisfaction in the Holy Spirit's comfort and companionship. A stronger faith in God, who promises to meet our needs—including the desire for community he places within us. A fresh experience of his love, from which nothing can separate me, not even loneliness. Courage to reach out and risk rejection—and to keep trying, despite failures.

But as a survivor of several friendship famines, I've observed a cyclical nature to relational ebb and flow. When we're in the trenches of transition—a relocation, a best friend's move, a job change, a breakup, an illness, a church schism, a divorce, a financial setback—we may be forced to tough out the loneliness, to keep praying in faith while crying on our pillow at night (or in a restroom stall at work, as I've done a few times in my life!).

And then, surprise! Sustenance comes, often when we least expect it, often where we don't anticipate it. We find God plants someone new in our path—perhaps to tide us over, or perhaps to nourish us deeply. And the famine begins to recede.

Today I'm in a feasting season. I'm savoring a satisfying circle of friends—old, and new, and renewed—I hadn't anticipated I'd enjoy when I retired from my job of 20 years. But because I know I'll probably go through another friendship famine in the future, I'm busy storing up the richness, the fullness of the present. And then, when the relational lean times come, I'll draw on God's sustaining power, confident he'll lead me through them once again toward the kind of provisions I've relished in the past.

Have you undergone seasons of “feast or famine�?in your friendships? How do you handle a friendship famine? And how has God worked to meet your relational needs?

Posted at 9:41 AM on September 16, 2008.