Chutes
Michael W. Smith composed the iconic song, “Friends,” in roughly thirty minutes. The year was 1983 and Bill Jackson, Michael’s close friend from his Bible study group, was moving away. Michael’s wife, Debbie, decided he should write their spiritual brother a tribute and perform it at his farewell dinner that evening, but Michael wasn’t too keen on the thought. They had less than an afternoon.
Debbie insisted.
She quickly penned the poem that curled into lyrics, then handed them to her husband who sat down at the piano and braided her words into a Grammy-award-winning song.
“Packing up the dreams God planted/ in the fertile soil of you. . . “
I never hear that opening line that I don’t get a lump the size of a ping-pong ball in my throat.
Friends. They can be, sometimes are--but often aren’t, our friends FOREVER. Even if, and when, “the Lord’s the Lord of them.” Lives, like rivers, don’t flow at foreseeable clips or in a linear fashion. Our journeys crook and bend and deviate-- speed up and slow to a pool--for reasons we both do and don’t control. We relocate. They have children. We change churches. They change jobs. We don’t divorce one another—the fissures show up without invitation or approval--but our connections fade, regardless. It can get hard for friendships to hang on.
And so, we often assemble for a season, gathering possies that anchor us for a stretch, in a room where rhythms overlap. Our friends become our friends in slippery stages.
We also tend to congregate in chutes. We have work friends. Church friends. Neighbor friends. Childhood friends. Family friends. Tennis friends. College friends. Hobby friends. People we enjoy and can relate to because of where, when and how our lifelines intersect. We bond together in holding pens. These tribes run deep, forming at various ages and lasting for varying lengths of time. They are sustaining, integral even, though they are mostly contained.
But sometimes, if we’re really, really lucky, we form bonds that boundaries can’t hem in. Kinships that aren’t affected by time or space or circumstance. Our hearts get knotted up and so, we go together. Wherever and however it is we go.
And if we’re really, really, I-found-the-five-leaf-clover fortunate, we bump into our people early and they grow old with us. Such lifelong friendships drip with grace, a succor that isn’t won or lost but is simply passed around thanks to a timeline shared and chosen to be preserved.
The air inside such relationships is rare.
There’s just something about knowing someone before they got (or didn’t get!) their boobs, or had their eyebrows done or figured out how best to wear their hair. The ones who waged war with acne alongside of us have a sense of how we’re stitched together and by what. We knew who each other was before we each became who we are. Most importantly, we’re on a first name basis with the “while” that came in-between.
Forever friends become so because they hold on through the spin cycle of the middle--when marriages dissolve or deepen, when babies arrive at once or after trial, when parents pass away or hang on longer than expected, when careers wrap up and open spaces call or mock. We can trace the pockmarks of one another’s unfolding with our fingers, as if the scars are our own.
We share uncommon knowledge.
And we keep on going because what’s unknown doesn’t trip us up. We pass around Trust with a capital “T”-- the kind that transcends time, distance, and information. We could go for months—or even years—without so much as a well-meant, “What’s up?” and yet pick back up as if we just spoke yesterday. Our glances don’t need words. Our questions don’t need context. We share an emotional shorthand bound by intertwined roots.
I can’t speak for everyone, but as a blessed recipient of such extraordinary friendships, the gaps between the twisty spots occasionally make me mad. We missed so much while spinning wildly in the middle.
We did the easy—we showed up, we didn’t drop the ball. But we leapt over the ordinary. The daily hard of complex engagement. We can’t get a common Tuesday morning back.
That’s why the friendship anthem sticks. It reminds us that we never really get forever.
P.S. Friends