Gossip and Friend Ground Rules
Discovering the Joy of
Life-Giving Friendships
Do you find yourself coming home from a girls’ night out feeling discouraged or encouraged? The answer to how we have LIFE GIVING relationships lies in what it is we talk about. I have left a group thinking I had fun, only to later realize that I left a little emptier than when I showed up. That has a lot more to do with what we focused on during our time together.
In Philippians, Paul has such draining friends, and he handles it in the most life-giving way. He doesn’t confront them about the things they’ve done or said about him. Rather, he praises them. He shifts and changes the view of these people. And in so doing, he shifts his own view of these people.
We often fixate on the negative in our lives and other people, and Paul didn't want to complain about them.
“It may momentarily feel good to vent, but it doesn’t pour into your soul.”
We end up leaving each other more discouraged and drained rather than the discipline of choosing to see the good.
If you have friends that are constantly talking about other people with you, rest assured that they’re also talking about you when you're not there.
And so, you've got to build a culture with your friendship. If your friends are constantly gossiping, you've got to build ground rules. The healthiest friendships I've been in always have ground rules. Ground rules will help you realize when your friendship is not going in the right direction.
It may be awkward to have the conversations about ground rules, but it’s for the benefit of everyone in your community. You must have those awkward conversations to build life-giving friendships and communities around you.
So, sit your friends down. Acknowledge that you have been gossiping within your group. Let them know you don't feel safe with them, and that you don't think they feel safe with you. Tell them you’d like to stop gossiping moving forward. Create a healthy, safe space where you can hold each other accountable to this.
You may be worried that your friends will disown you, especially if you’re still in high school. Better that than to feel like you don't have real friends or a safe place. Having open dialogue with your friends will create a relationship where you assume the best about each other because you won’t speak ill of other people, or of each other.
This brings about so much joy because you’re not focusing on negative things. Focusing on the negative can have you feeling and living in the negative.
Paul does not focus on the negative people doing negative things. Instead, He actually praises them for what they're doing right. He believes that God is bigger and better than the destruction they're trying to bring. We often take our eyes off of God and our relationships and put them on people, and we end up disappointed in some way.
Being Vulnerable with Your Friends
One of Evil's primary methodologies of accessing people's hearts and minds is through the implementation of shame. And so, God coming to us is the model by which we then go to others. Therefore, we want to be in communities in which we are able to be vulnerable. One of the antidotes for shame is the activity of vulnerability, being fully true, telling the whole truth about what I sense and feel and think.
The need for vulnerability brings with it the importance of confession.
Confession is not just an act of dictating your sins to others. It’s your embodied action of revealing the whole truth of who you are in the presence of someone else. When you see them receiving even the part of you that longs, dreams, and desires as well as the dark, awful parts you hate, a stronger relationship is built. Therefore, confession is an opportunity to not be alone. It is the gospel coming to you.
As your friendship grows, you will spend more time with each other. And as you do, there will be parts of yourself you may worry about exposing to the other person. These are the parts we hide because we’re ashamed and worried that people will leave us if they realize those parts exist.
“To leave someone at a time of vulnerability is not Godly.”
In our communities, there are these outposts of goodness and beauty that we are trying to create for us to dismantle shame in real embodied storytelling fashion. It not just a matter of feeling better when you share your story. It's that you also have the embodied experience of being better and take that remembered experience with me into the other parts of your life, where you are recommissioned to make things, new relationships, new missions, and new ministries. That is a direct continuation of the new creation that is born at the resurrection, such that the healing of shame is not just about us being relieved of the dark side of sin. It's not just about us feeling better as people. It is about us being recommissioned to make the things that God has planned for us to make from before the foundation of the world.
The Barrier to Finding Community
Having too many technological mechanisms at our disposal has made it far more difficult to build communities of your own. We use tools like social media to cope with our internal distress. Eventually, we hardly see people in person. If we take the internet away, or at the very least limit our reliance on it, we’ll be more likely to turn toward a real-life embodied person.
When the brain is left to its own devices, we do whatever is most expeditious to reduce any kind of emotional distress we have. Calling someone to let them know you’re not in a good place takes far more energy and vulnerability than it takes to simply distract oneself by checking Facebook. These things facilitate and encourage not being in community. And so, we practice exiting community by picking up our cell phones.
Why is it important to share?
Why would that make you happy?
We were made to make things, to live in and as God's image. This includes our intended purpose to create goodness and beauty all around us. And we can't make goodness and beauty in a full-throated way. We can't make it with all of who we are, we can't love the Lord our God or the others around us, or those things that we are called to make with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength if we are working so hard to contain a great deal of it behind a wall.
Sharing circumvents that wall we’ve built in our minds and allows others into the part of us that is undefended.
That part so desperately wants to be seen and known. In my best worst moments, I want to be seen and know that you still want to stay in the room. I want to know that my suffering matters to you because I was made to not live with my suffering, or my joy by myself. And evil will do everything it can to rob us of that experience.
And so, today I want you to be unafraid to be wanted. Be expectant and open to what God has placed and has envisioned for you to make in a new way that you didn't even know. You won’t know God’s vision until you allow yourself to be open. Until you allow your suffering, shame and grief to be accessed by a community that wants to be in your room.
Vulnerability is not something we choose to be or not to be. We are vulnerable creatures because nobody gets out alive. However, we can choose the degree to which we lean into our vulnerability. It's a question of finding ways to live fully into what you have been created to be, including allowing for and paying attention to and accessing those parts of your heart where you carry the sadness. This means you don’t carry the sadness by yourself. To be vulnerable with someone else means you're going to allow someone else to carry your sadness with them.
[And when we have the experience of being a feeling felt by another, our mind knows it is not alone in the world. Being vulnerable is not an easy thing to do. You’re making a choice to allow yourself to not be alone.]
As you’re growing that community built on safety and God’s purpose for your life, make this promise to yourself:
The one thing I want to do is as I am able, be attentive in each moment, to the delight in presence of God, where I am in that moment, to choose to pay attention to that and allow that to inform whatever is happening in this moment. And choose not to pay attention to whatever message of shame that will necessarily always be in competition with my desire to pay attention to God's delight.
I think everything else becomes a byproduct of my choice to pay attention to one or the other of those two things.
Jennie's latest book, ‘Find Your People’ is available from retailers nationwide and on Amazon.
