Pastor’s Blog
Do you feel that you don’t have enough friends? Maybe you feel that you actually have too many people wanting to be your friends! Both are legitimate realities, and honestly, we all will feel one or both of these ways at one time or another. I think I can help you understand what’s going on in those feelings and a way to get a handle on it.
Have you heard of Dunbar’s number? Dunbar, a scientist, recognized that wild primates lived in social networks about of about the same number from group to group. He carried that number into studying other animals and even humans, recognizing that with some variance, we each successfully and naturally hold an active network of about 150 people. If we don’t have a network to capacity, we may naturally find ourselves feeling lonely or at least inadvertently alone when we didn’t want to be. If a network grows to be more than our natural capacity, we will unintentionally end up losing touch with some people. You might hear the number 150 and think that that’s too many people to keep friendships active with any degree of quality, but you’ll be surprised if you made a friendship inventory.
Shasta Nelson, who has spoken at Hollywood Adventist Church a number of years ago, is a friendship guru who explains that friends come in all forms, not just of the best friends variety. We have friendships with everyone that we have banked some degree of familiarity, regularity, and good times with. We have friends that we might only see at work or at the gym, and we might have friends that we see only in group settings, and still others that used to be best friends seeing them everyday, but now because they moved, we text about the important things that come up maybe once a week. When you take that kind of inventory of your regular life routine, 150 might feel just about right. [Read one of Shasta Nelson’s books or watch one of her workshops on YouTube to better apply it for yourself.]
We all want to feel that we are a part of a circle of friends where we belong and contribute, where we feel loved and accepted. Wouldn’t that be wonderful if that place was in our church for you and for everyone else too? Although we have many strides in that direction, I see some things are still getting in the way, and I think the biggest things are our expectations of what friendships are, what church should be, and what our role is in this community. To illustrate, I’ll share my own experience with these details I’ve just shared, and I pray you will trace your own way to better friend network by it.
A little bit of time after I came to Hollywood, I still had a lot of friends back in the La Sierra / Loma Linda area from college days. I would visit some contingent of them almost every weekend, enjoying the familiarity they brought to my life and pastime. As my friends continued in their lives and me in mine, I realized I was making a decision by my actions. I knew that friendships don’t “just happen” and they won’t especially when I’m spending every weekend trying to maintain my past active connections.
I had learned of Dunbar’s number and I also knew that our church had over a hundred people in its orbit. I also knew that I loved our church and felt with confidence that God had led me here. So I invested myself fully into the people in our church, probably specifically into you reading this blurb I’m writing, and I let many of my friendships become dormant - not canceled - just into a “I’ll see them when I see them” state, knowing that it’ll be great when I’m around my old friends, but I’m in Los Angeles now. This is my city, these are my people, and I want to get to know them, I want to learn to love them, because obviously God does and so will I. I made that choice to fully invest and I love my network of all kinds of friendships here!
I’m just starting this conversation for us to continue. You have about 150, what number can you let open for investing in this community that is called by God’s name in this great city that God loves? I want to encourage you to open yourself up to the experience God has for you here. Consider who might be in your friendship circles you didn’t consider friends before. Friends come in all shapes and sizes, kinds and colors, and God has a rich experience awaiting you here. God has a great experience waiting for you, will you open yourself up for it?
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