LCF’s ladies’ Sunday school is going through “Wising Up”–a Beth Moore study on Proverbs. In our last session, Beth talked about the difference between acquaintance and friend.
She said that maybe a lot of people we call friends are actually acquaintances–people we communicate with on a head to head level, but never on a heart to heart level.
Which got me thinking.
I’m a head person–I like to think, I like to discuss, I like to debate. I like ideas–and interacting with people about them.
While I have certainly coveted heart-to-heart relationships in the past, I find unrelenting heart-to-heart exhausting and unfulfilling. Give me a good head-to-head though… I rarely grow tired.
I’ve spent almost ten solid hours talking politics with a friend an acquaintance. I’ve spent hours talking medicine with others. Head to head is my forte.
The hard part is where there’s a kindred-ness of heart without a kindred-ness of mind.
Beth Moore spoke of friends as being people who you can be with without setting a “stage.” We “stage” our encounters with acquaintances by choosing to “do something” or “meet somewhere”. The stage is the movie, or the restaurant, or whatever.
But therein lies my difficulty with Moore’s system of classification. According to her, an acquaintance is someone you interact with on a head-to-head level in a staged environment, while a friend is someone you interact with on a heart-to-heart level in an unstaged environment. My experience is different. My experience has been that both head-to-head and heart-to-heart relationships require stages. It is only when head-to-head AND heart-to-heart relationships coexist that the relationship can be truly unstaged.
I have great friends (or perhaps it’s acquaintances). Either way, I truly enjoy the people I spend time around.
But I long for a connection that goes beyond the one-sided exchange I live in so often. Either we connect head to head or we connect heart to heart–and neither the twain shall meet.
I long for a dual connection–a friend that I can share my heart with, whose heart is shared with me, a friend that I can share my brain with, whose brain is shared with me. Someone I can dream with, someone I can discuss things with, someone I can do things with, someone I can do nothing with. This is the kind of friendship I desire.
Is it possible on this side of heaven? Is such a whole-person union to be found? I don’t know. But still I dream. I dream of giving my whole self to someone and receiving that someone’s whole self in return.
A romantic notion? Certainly. An impossible notion? I certainly hope not.