I’ve been blessed with a good number of friends in my life. The bulk of them I met in high school and twenty years later I’m still friends with them. The group of us has stayed in touch over the years and still continues to do various activities together. In talking with other people, I’ve learned that this is actually rare both in number and longevity but to me it is just natural. But maintaining friendships takes a lot of effort and can easily overwhelm you if they get out of balance.

One concept that was difficult for me to grasp was that there were some friends that you will keep in touch most of your life and there are those friends that will drift in and out based on life circumstances. The latter group took me by surprise because until then, my friends were there for life. But I had people who I was close friends with start to drift away due simply to the fact that we were in two different places in our lives. Our paths no longer crossed and as we saw less of each other, we just stopped communicating.

After this happened a few times, I realized that certain friendships just fade away and stay dormant until circumstances change again. Maybe I should call these acquaintances rather than friends. This is different from my other friendships in that while my relationship with them might wane over time, eventually it will wax again and we would continue to talk and do things together. So I now acknowledge that some friendships will fade away and others will continue indefinitely.

But maintaining friendships can be a significant amount of work and any relationship with people can create baggage. Within my close group of friends there are times when certain people don’t get along with each other and if I’m planning some kind of event, I need to keep this in mind to prevent a scene. When we were in our twenties, you almost needed a flowchart to keep track who was currently not speaking to whom and about what, less you create some kind of faux pas.

So we have this dynamic group that ebbs and flows like the tide as time goes on. Some people moved away and our communication with them faltered. Occasionally, one of us would make some half-hearted attempt to reconnect everyone but it usually fizzled out. I was then forced to reevaluate my thoughts on friendships. Maybe they were all transitory?

It was during this time of that I attended a men’s retreat in Chattanooga with a couple of other friends from Sunday School. At this retreat a group of guys spoke about living together and all the time they had spent together. They had met in college and continued on living with each other to the point where they were all married with children but lived “in community” which I assumed meant in the same building or location. They had a PowerPoint presentation showing pictures of their history together. At this moment I had an epiphany.

My friends and I had a bunch of pictures of all the different things we did together. It would be a shame for those to get lost so I asked them all to let me borrow any picture they had of us. I scanned all of them, intending originally to burn them to CD for each of us, but then changed the idea to posting a website for it so even those I had no contact with could enjoy our shared history. Later we added an email group and forum leading to incredible ease of communication among the group.

These simple acts brought us together quicker than any abortive attempt to get together like in the “old days” and the good news was it didn’t require some kind of once-in-a-lifetime event to happen. Our friendships have been renewed and we have grown closer because of it.

I wonder what would have happened to us if I hadn’t attended that retreat. Our friendships were way out of balance for a number of reasons, but no one really noticed nor did we know what to do with it. All it took was one small action to bring it together, and honestly it was a simple one. Perhaps you have some friendships out of balance that just need a small action to move back into balance?