One of my besties back home in my favorite city, Des Moines, Iowa, likes to mf with new people and then tell me all about it. No doubt he loved my look of shock the first time I heard he had mf-ed a stranger, but, fear not gentle reader, "mf" just stands for "make friends."
Making friends as a kid is as easy as asking someone to sit by you on the school bus or accepting an invitation to play outside with a neighbor. Your childhood friends are typically dictated by proximity, who you attend school with, and who your parents have relationships with. There's little guesswork.
As an adult, I've finally learned I can be choosy about who I spend my time with and who I call a friend. If someone doesn't stimulate me or, on the other end of the spectrum, make me laugh until I want to pass out, then I don't have to continue to invite them into my life. My friends are chosen exclusively by me and if I don't like who I'm hanging out with, I can only blame myself. I'm no longer in a place in life where I have to tolerate "friends" on the playground. I've intentionally surrounded myself with amazing people who I am honored to call friends. I am so crazily proud of my friends and I haven't expected to meet anyone else with whom I'd want to build a friendship.
The World Race is not like real life at home because I don't get to choose with whom I spend my time. My team was assigned to me only five days after I'd met these people. It's kinda like elementary school all over again where you don't get to choose who else is in your class or with whom you'll spend the year.
There are six other people on my World Race team and we definitely make a great team, but did we make friends? I've been telling them it's too early to call them friends, that they're my "future friends."
This week I accidentally dropped the F bomb on my teammates. I was addressing the group when I said something like, "We're all friends here." And that's when it hit me that we really were. We really are. We're all friends here.
I didn't think I had any more room in my heart for new people, but I hadn't factored in how big and far-reaching love can be. I've got six new friends chosen, not by me, but by God. We're certainly still in the early "getting to know you" stages, but we are friends who live together, work and serve alongside each other, and have hard conversations in order to push each other toward growth.
This is surely going to be an mf story worth telling to my friends in Iowa.
