This one's for Christy Faith

The first time I met Christy she was giving a voluntary book report on Lottie Moon in our weekly Sunday night GA’s class at Kingwood First Baptist Church. Soon after, she began inviting herself over to my house every week after Sunday school. Unable to resist her huge eyeglasses and beloved teddy bear t-shirts, I readily accepted. Maybe it was late spring afternoons spent blackberry picking on the greenbelt trails. Maybe it was long, sticky summer days traversing those trails on our bikes, hoping to get lost and have an excuse to return home much later. Maybe it was the way she woke up hours before me mornings after sleepovers and simply sat in my room silently, reading my books, not disturbing me one little bit. Or maybe it was the long nights of our sleepovers—we obediently jumped under the covers of my bed at ten o’clock, but stayed up talking about every entity of our eight-year-old lives for much longer than our mothers would have approved. Whatever it was, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I’m not sure at what point we decided to be best friends. Maybe it just happened, but I do know for sure that there wasn’t a moment from that point on that Christy Faith O’Farrell was not my bff. And I was hers.

Throughout elementary, middle, and high school, Christy and I had more fun together than some people have in a lifetime. We organized our own summer jobs by creating a day camp for little girls in her backyard. For five summers, we somehow convinced the mothers of children from church and the neighborhood to drop their daughters off for “Princess Camp” where they would play games, do crafts, and sing songs. I think we might have made $40 each one of those summers, but it didn’t matter to us. We videotaped music videos of ourselves rocking out to Zoegirl and advertising fake commercials for weight loss. We made plans to start orphanages, write books, and befriend the homeless. We rebelled from the Homecoming dance one year and rebelliously went to a steakhouse to order virgin strawberry daiquiris at the bar. We made up original recipes using our mothers’ kitchen ingredients…at one point regrettably causing another little girl to throw up due to our lack of culinary skills. We shopped for prom dresses and won free tickets to a Taylor Swift concert. We donned every style conceivable for numerous self photo shoots, belted the lyrics to a million country songs, and explored the depths of life, love, and our God through conversations over countless cups of coffee.

It was in the midst of one of those conversations that we realized how special our friendship was, what a gift it was, how not everyone had a “Christy” or a “Michelle”. We decided that we were more than best friends—we were kindred spirits. We decided this because we knew that in spite of the insurmountable fun we had together, our connection as human beings was based on much more than good times. We decided that behind all of the laughter, smiles, notes, and heart-to-heart conversations, our hearts were attracted to one another because we shared a mutual relationship with God. We both saw our lives in light of the love of God, and because He was in both us, it was Him that drew us together.

It’s funny because if you ask the two us about our experiences in high school, we’ll give you two very different answers. I committed myself to honors classes and way too many extra-curricular activities. Christy never studied a day in her life and skipped so much school she almost didn’t graduate. We hung out with completely different groups of people, and our mutual friends were few and far between. Because of this, we didn’t always see each other on a regular basis. Our high school contained 4,000 students so it was easy to unintentionally avoid crossing paths for a week or so at a time. The summer after our senior year was the best of all, though, because we finally figured out how to spend every spare moment together. Outside of our jobs, families, and boyfriends, the two of us were together every other waking second. Our friendship grew immensely during those last few months before going off to college, and we came to know and understand one another on an unparalleled level.

A couple years prior, an older friend of mine went off to college and came home to tell me she didn’t really talk to her best friend from high school anymore. She and her “Christy” had grown apart, and I was shocked. I should have been scared, too, but I wasn’t. I somehow honestly, earnestly believed that Christy and I were immune to the ebbs and flows of life, immune to change, and immune to growing apart. I find myself feeling a little naïve for so adamantly feeling that way at the time, but it was only because I was naïve, and Christy really meant that much to me.

We went off to college still holding onto this confidence. Christy went to a state university relatively close to home and I headed to a small, private, liberal arts college hours away in the next state over. Immediately, our environments changed drastically, not only from those environments we had grown up with at home, but from each other’s. The first couple months, we ran up our phone bills talking for an hour or more every single night. Before the end of our first semesters, though, Christy and I began changing. We were both growing immensely, but in very different ways, and in ways that each of us had a terribly hard time understanding. I know there have been moments in the last eighteen months when both of us, individually and at different times, felt like our friendship was falling apart, when we were scared and cried alone, and when we wondered if we would ever understand each other again.

After eighteen months of incredibly concentrated change, exposure, and living of life a lot further than a bike ride away, Christy and I have hung onto that core thread of friendship that made us best friends, and kindred spirits, in the first place. God. Our lives are very different. We care about very different things. There are some matters that we have silently agreed not to discuss. We finally admitted to each other how scared we both were for a long time of growing apart, and how we’ve both accepted that our friendship of childhood is over. I think it’s a rare and beautiful thing, though, that our friendship itself is not going to end. Although in new and different ways, we both still see our lives in light of the immense and gracious love of our God. We’re going to fight to understand and love one another in spite of these changing times. Because we realize that a friendship like ours isn’t something to be taken lightly. It’s something worth fighting for, and we hope to God that it works.

Ever since we’ve been eight years old, Christy Faith and I have had a song that we felt puts a few words to our friendship:

Something brought you to my mind today
I thought about the funny ways you make me laugh
And yet I feel like it's okay to cry with you
Something about just being with you
When I leave I feel like I've been near God
And that's the way it ought to be...

You had faith, when I had none
You prayed God would bring me a brand new song
When I didn't think I could find the strength to sing
And all the while I'm hoping that I'll
Do the kind of praying for you that you've done for me
And that's the way it ought to be

'Cause you've been more than a friend to me
You fight off my enemies
'Cause you've spoken the Truth over my life
And you'll never know what it means to me
Just to know you've been on your knees for me
Oh, you have blessed my life
More than you'll ever know
-Watermark

If you hear us tell one another, “more than you’ll ever know” with a smile or a wink, that’s what we’re talking about ♥