Messy Beautiful Friendship Finding and nurturing deep and lasting relationships by Christine Hoover

It's a beautiful, inspiring book Messy Beautiful Friendship Finding and nurturing deep and lasting relationships by Christine Hoover published by BakerBooks.
The author is the wife of a pastor and she analyzes friendship and what friendship has meant and means for her and should mean for all of us seeing it under a christian perspective as well.
She starts from childhood when everything is simple, when friendship is more or less automatic. We are not yet into the adult age.
After it, Christine describes her high-school years and her best girlfriend with which she tried to keep a great friendship also after that they had finished high-school choosing different paths.

Because friendship is dedication.
Substantially we can't grow up a good garden of friends if we don't remove weeds, if we are not always there for irrigating our garden of friends with love, attention, good words, patience, energy, ability of forgiving, because we can be hurt and we can hurt during a friendship, being there in moments of need.

True, absolutely true that at university there is a great acceptance of the new ones and establishing good friendship is not substantially difficult. High school is over, character is formed, the biggest turbulence of teenage age over and young adults are ready to becoming what they want to become in life.

But the adult age is  tremendous for friendship because the person, the example the one of a woman, doesn't have anymore the spontaneity of the past in the approach with another person with which she thinks she could potentially become friends with.

The joy of being there with someone is replaced  by more responsibilities.
There is maybe a family with children, a house a husband, a work, a crazy life. Cultivating friendship become difficult. In particular if we have been hurt in the past, if we have hurt as well.

Christine defines a certain group of people: magnet friends. The ones with the capacity of being real magnets for other people. They start, develop and are in friendship with everyone, because everyone love them.

To these magnet-people Christine suggests a beautiful approach with people in need because these magnet-people received by God a great gift: they are charismatic and they're able to touch the chords of other human beings better than not another common person being so strongly helpful in difficult situations.

But what to do with friendship during our adult age?
Are we opened or closed?
We can't be closed to novelties and new friendship says the author, forgetting our wish-dream of a perfect friendship.

Some friends by Christine Hoover Kay and Kenny hung this sign when they were little: "Back-door friends are best."

It's wonderful.

When you receive the visit of a friend that doesn't need to knock to your door, and that it's like part of the family, a person or a girlfriend that mustn't be announced and she is there just for you, for chatting with you, for helping you, for drinking a tea with you with a slice of cake, for let you smile and receive your company, the best gift of this world.

Starting from this perspective, the author thought that at a certain point she had lost her "compass" in terms of friendships. She didn't want to make any new friends, she sounded uninterested to create other friends apart the old ones she had.
And it was, admits Christine, all her fault because she was searching for perfection.
Her friends had to be in a certain way.

Just later Christine understood that leaving open the door of friendship she would have met other wonderful girlfriends.
Giving hospitality a great start and a great example also for the most reluctant ones.
Yes because we mustn't search for perfection.
The perfect lunch, better if it's perfect but what we will be remembered are other sensations not just food, see at the voice Bridget Jones' blue broth.
Her friends didn't abandon her because that dinner well was a complete failure; the perfect house, the "what that x person will think of me?"...
These ones are intoxicating thoughts that won't bring anywhere.

No one is perfect but there is a singular imperfection in every friendship and in every human being and it's that peculiar imperfection of that person that maybe we are searching for, and not the perfection in a friend.

Hospitality and opening our doors will create great connections because we will open, opening our doors, also our hearts and permitting to everyone to be our friends.
Remember the quote in About a Boy a movie with Hugh Grant?
"Once you open your door to one person, anyone can come in."
Because: "No man is an island."

Let's also remember to be ourselves without too much interior and exterior make-up. I found fascinating the story told by Christine.

This book is not long but it is plenty of great suggestions if you want to keep, revive, living with Christianity your friendship with your girlfriends and all your friends.

At the end of the book questions for friends to discuss together, Lessons on Friendship, Wisdom from the Bible on Friendship.

I thank so much Baker Books for the physical copy of this book.


Anna Maria Polidori