Many, many moves ago...

This is my first time writing for Blogs of Beauty, and I have no idea who God will send this direction. But this Blogs of Beauty post on the Beauty of Reaching Out tugged at me, so I thought I'd give it a try.

See, I know a lot about reaching out. In the 5 1/2 years that my husband and I have been married, we have moved 4 times. We're not in the military, but my husband's graduation from law school and his clerkship options necessitated all this. These moves were not just moves down the street and around the corner. Each time, we had to pick up our life and move it states away, and we had to start over again with a new church, new jobs, and a new set of friends.

Many, many moves ago, I was a girl who'd grown up on the same patch of land that her daddy grew up on. I didn't have to reach out much because I had a network of friends and family that I'd built over my young lifetime. That time is over, and I have learned a lot about the hard, complicated, but rewarding work of reaching out. When I have gotten a little bit comfortable in a new place, and I meet someone who's just moved into the area, I look at them completely differently than I did before my odyssey began. Before, I simply wasn't aware of all the relational needs that they had as they timidly stepped out into a brave, new world. I am much more compassionate now.

This has been a great thing for my spiritual growth, even though it's been a somewhat difficult lesson to learn. Reaching out can be beautiful, but it isn't always easy. Reaching out requires vast reserves of patience and stubborness and the ability to handle subtle rejection and failure. Reaching out requires that the one reaching out to others be able to develop a thick skin, despite the fact that loneliness and uncertainty have made her skin thinner than it normally would be.

Reaching out is not for the faint of heart, but it's worth it. The alternative, at least for those of us who've moved and have no choice, is to become a sad, little island, un-nourished by others and useless to the local body of Christ. In order to serve, we need to invest in other lives, and the first step to doing that is to put yourself out there. Putting yourself out there may involve many things, but the first thing it could involve might be introducing yourself to someone and making the effort to converse after church when you feel like you'd rather just walk out to the door and go to lunch. It might mean inviting a couple over for dinner, knowing that they might not reciprocate your invitation.

I enjoy cooking, and David and I enjoy having people over, so one of the things that we have learned to do is invite others over for dinner regularly. It doesn't have to be anything fancy that we're serving, and it often isn't. The house doesn't have to be spotless. It's not. The point is just to make the effort to get to know others better by having them in our home. We have done this for several years now, and we're getting better and better at inviting and making people comfortable. At one point, we were feeling like it was difficult to get to know people in our church, so we decided to have two nights a week, if we could, when we invited over different people. They were all ages, though most were older than us in this particular church. Even for a chef wannabe like me, this was ambitious. We gave it up after a couple of months out of exhaustion, but we did do it, and it was good.

I learned many things from this and from all our years of inviting over, and I pass this on to you, the person who may have just moved or may be moving.

You may invite over 3 times as many people as reciprocate your invitations in some way.

If you are reaching out, expecting that others will put in as much work as you have to reach back to you, you may be disappointed. There are a variety of reasons for this. Maybe they just didn't click with you (you could be hopeless dorks like me and David =), or, more likely, their lives are already so full of family and friends that they simply don't have a friendship opening there for you at the time. Maybe they don't like to cook, and they don't want to serve you pizza at their house, even though you'd be happy to eat it.

Don't be discouraged, and don't give up. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep going, friend. It may take time, and you may feel like you'll never gain the comfortable relationships that you had in your old neighborhood or church, but eventually, it will get better.

The mountain of invitations that you've put out there will eventually lead you to a gem of a friend, the diamond in the rough that is worth all the effort to find that person who is looking for a friend just like you.

And even if years go by, and that illusive friend hasn't yet been found, remember that reaching out isn't all about you anyway. It's about Christ and his instructions that we do not forsake assembling together. The Christian life was meant to be lived in community, and if we're not doing that, we're missing out on being a blessing to others.

I've seen how God has put me in the right place at the right time over and over again to help someone else, and I can look back and see all the steps that I had to take to get there, steps that sometimes didn't seem worth it. I would've rather gone home and watched tv that night, but now I'm glad I didn't. =) If my life is ultimately not supposed to be about me and my needs and wants, (and it's not, if I'm reading my Bible correctly), then reaching out is just another thing that I do because I want to glorify my Savior. And when I do it with that in mind, then my reaching out is always a beautiful thing. ***P.S., if you want to read more on this topic from my perspective, check out my Sept. 22, 2006 blog called "The meet and greet." Happy blog hopping!