I have a dear friend. A great friend. The older I get, the more I realize she is a once-in-a- lifetime friend. (And that’s only if you’re lucky enough to have a lifetime that includes a friend like her. Most people aren’t.) Her name is Vicky.
I don’t remember meeting Vicky. My parents told me the stork brought her to the little house across the street from mine when I was six months old. For me, she was just always there, since before the beginning of memory–to play dress-up, to swim, to watch movies, to argue over who got to play Cinderella and who had to play the wicked stepmother AND stepsisters.
We would run across the street to one another at any available opportunity, hoping to spend every minute of the day together. Who showed up at whose house first became a matter of the grave importance. We had both learned that good manners required us to to allow… someone to go first. There was an order to these things, but we couldn’t pinpoint what it was:
“The host goes first!”
“No! The GHOST! The ghost goes first!”
“It’s the guest, not the ghost!”
“Yeah, the guest goes first!”
“Hey, that’s not what I meant!”
Giggles.
And then we’d start in again, because we both wanted to go first. We would go around and around for what felt like hours to my preschool sensibilities. But my heart doesn’t remember the tensed shoulders and churning stomach of conflict in those moments. It remembers feeling the warmth of her presence, the joy in being together even if we didn’t agree. It felt like something necessary was just… right. Whether we were happy or sad, laughing or angry, we were vital gears in the machinery of one another’s being.
That’s how I remember the differences of the adult world creeping into our lives--the difference mattered much less than being together. One memory stands out in particular, maybe because both of our families still tell the story and laugh. Our parents were vocal supporters of difference candidates in the 1984 U.S. Presidential election. Her parents’ favorite—Walter Mondale—lost to my parents’ favorite—Ronald Reagan—by more than 18% of the vote.
I remember adult conversation about the election buzzing above our heads in my family’s kitchen. I remember the slump of Vicky’s blonde head down between her shoulders as we listened. It is hard to say how much something like an election matters to a five-year-old. Our intellectual comprehension of what happened was minimal, but our emotional sensibilities were in it 100%. My friend was hurting. What she didn’t understand may have hit home more for her than anyone in the room who had actually voted. What could I do? I hugged her and consoled her, “It’s okay. Maybe Mondale will win next time.”
As we got older, even more differences confronted us. They went a lot deeper than which political candidates our families supported. My family had our butts in the pew of an evangelical church every Sunday morning and evening. Wednesdays, too, and often on vacation. Vicky went to Catholic parochial school; I spent a year being homeschooled to counter the indoctrination of the public schools. Other than sending Vicky to parochial school, her family was casual about religion. At my church, I learned that casual Christianity was bad—possibly even worse than not being a Christian at all.
Vacation Bible school was a summer ritual at my family’s church. We were always armpit-deep in helping with the preparations. Every year, there was a theme: beach party, the ten commandments, outer space. Sometime when we were around five or six, there was a safari theme, and we transformed the entire church basement into a jungle with cutout lions and frogs and crepe paper vines hanging from the ceiling. There were games, there were songs, there were Bible stories. I loved it, and when the teachers told us to invite our friends, I couldn’t wait to tell Vicky.
“Hey, we made a jungle in our church basement.”
“A jungle??”
“Yeah, with creeping vines and everything. When you go in, it’s all dark and scary and there are jungle sounds playing.”
“Cool!”
“Wanna come with me?”
“Yeah! Lemme ask my parents!”
I was elated when she got permission. The big day started upstairs in the pews, where we sang songs and heard a lesson. Vicky and I always sat as close together as we could—we often shared chairs, sometimes even the toilet seat. This time, we scrunched up against one another in the pew. I helped her learn the songs so she could sing along.
The head teacher got up to give the lesson, and she shared the good news of Jesus. “Have you ever done anything bad? Something you know you’re not supposed to do?”
Shuffling and whispering quieted. There were a few nods. Everyone was paying attention, including Vicky. Good, I’m glad she gets to hear the Good News.
“The Bible teaches that everyone has sinned. Remember this week’s verse? Romans 3:23,” she chanted slowly so we could recite it along with her, “‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’ That’s all of us! Me, and you, and you, and everyone in the whole world. Now what does that mean? What are the wages of sin?”
A young blond boy with a buzz cut jumped up and recited another verse, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through JesusChristOurLordRomans6:23!” He sat as quickly as he’d popped up.
“That’s right, Luke. All of us deserve to go to hell. But the good news is that Jesus died on the cross for our sins so that we can have eternal life in heaven instead.”
I was only half listening by this point. I’d heard the gospel a million times, and I was eager to get downstairs to the jungle, where there were snacks and crafts. But I felt Vicky’s body tense next to mine. When I looked over, she was sitting straight up with her mouth pulled tight and her eyes wide.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
She kept listening for a minute, then turned to me, “Is hell… real?”
“Well, yeah, but good thing we have Jesus!… Don’t they talk about hell at your church?” She just looked at me.
She was only mildly appreciative of the jungle noises and unusually reserved through the crafts. She didn’t eat the snack, and she didn’t come back to Vacation Bible School with me again.
“Jesus is your best friend,” my teachers instructed. Could Vicky be my best friend if she didn’t know my other best friend? Things with Vicky seemed to work better than they were supposed to. I didn’t really understand, so I just rolled with it. I kept loving her and I kept inviting her to church events that she never came to.
I moved to a town about an hour away when we were seven. This was the eighties, when we’d never heard of the Internet and phone companies charged by the minute for long-distance calls. Our parents knew better than to trust us to keep the phone bill reasonable, so we wrote and wrote and wrote to one another. We used rainbow stationery, we experimented with invisible ink, we signed our letters with our own names and the names of our pets. We still saw each other as much as humanly possible.
We have both kept the letters. (Vicky stores hers in her freezer in case of a fire.) We’ve read through some of them. To read them all would take days. One she wrote to me stands out:
“Feb 1st, ’91
“Dear Amy,
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, and thank you for the hair band and wooden doves. They are very neat…Report cards came out on the 25th of January. I got one B. (If you don’t count Spanish—B+). The rest were As. I got the B in social studies… Mrs. Arnold had to go to Columbus today and yesterday. We had this substitute teacher who [is] really grumpy….
“Love,
“Bandit, Abby, Muffin, Buscuit, Ellie, Lily, Gypsy, Lorna, Katie, and Vicky
“P.S. My parents got a divorce.”
The understatement says it all—she was devastated. I felt completely helpless to do anything for my friend. I was far away and, well, I just didn’t know what to tell her. My own parents attributed their successful marriage to faith in God. They just shook their heads and sighed that we would pray for them. When Vicky’s mom moved her to the other side of the state to live with a female friend, they added side-long glances at each other to head shaking. Our visits became less frequent, and Vicky almost always came to stay with me when they did happen. No one ever said the word “lesbian” to me. Not Vicky, not her mother, not my own parents. I didn’t even know what one was until years later. I only knew my friend seemed more and more unhappy after she moved. The only thing I knew to do was to keep loving her and to pray harder for her soul.
We didn’t talk about the divorce much. We didn’t talk about what her mom’s relationship was with her new friend. Our parents must have thought otherwise, but for us, the differences between our worldviews were what they had been since Mondale lost the election—something tangential to our friendship. They were things that we were supposed to think about—like whether the host or the guest goes first—but that wasn’t really relevent to the core of who we were as friends.
The inertial pull we felt toward one another kept us in touch into adulthood. I went to a conservative Christian college, Vicky went to a large university to study journalism. I married Josh, who shared my beliefs, and moved with him to California. Vicky launched her journalism career and moved to the East coast with a college friend, Jess. We remained friends even as we moved farther and farther away from one another geographically, the time between our visits measured in years instead of hours.
I had been married and in California living my adult life for a few years when she finally announced she would come visit. I spent hours plotting out a detailed map and a schedule that would allow me to show her as many of the cool things near my home as I could in a few short days. I picked her up and took her on an hours-long tour of the coastline before we even went back to my apartment.
We found a beach and got out of the car to stretch and watch the ocean. Sitting on top of a dune watching the sun setting felt like perfection.
“Amy, I have something I need to tell you.”
“Anything.” I was glowing from just having her around.
“I… Jess isn’t just a friend… We’re together.”
“Oh. I’d kind of guessed that.” I laughed and shrugged a bit. What I said was true. I had suspected it for awhile. I didn’t believe homosexuality was okay. A part of me cared deeply, but I knew that part didn’t—couldn’t—belong in this conversation. I wanted to just get through it as quickly as I could, get back to being friends. I wanted her to feel at ease.
Then she turned and looked me straight in the eyes, “Is it… Is it still okay for me to stay at your house?” That question and the look in her eyes sliced my heart wide open.
I answered quickly, “Yeah! Of course!” And gave her a hug. I still wanted to reassure her, to move on quickly so we could enjoy our time together. But I was no longer the same. How could she even ask me that? Weren’t we best friends? Hadn’t she always been welcome? Yes, our beliefs were different, but… wasn’t I always inviting her to join me in mine, to understand one another better?
It is hard for me to admit, but the most hurtful part of that conversation for me was my feeling that she had willfully misunderstood me. She knew what I was about. She knew that I loved her. How could she question whether I’d be true to her and to our friendship?
We had a nice visit after our conversation at the beach, but after she left, our relationship grew more tense. We didn’t talk as often. We circled each other and cradled our own wounded hearts for years. We didn’t know how to reconcile what was happening to us, but we kept the friendship going in the form it had taken.
Several years went by, and we just didn’t talk about her sexual orientation much. We approached it the same way we had with the other things we didn’t know what to do with—my belief in hell, her parents’ divorce, her mother’s relationships. We just… didn’t talk about the things that felt like they might keep us apart.
I was hiding my own secrets–my marriage had started to crumble. I felt completely alone in it. Josh and I barely talked to one another. When we did, it was usually to argue. And our arguments didn’t feel like the ones I remembered with Vicky, where what mattered more than anything was that we were together. The arguments with Josh left a gnawing inside that didn’t go away even when they were over. I wasn’t talking to Vicky about it, but I wasn’t really talking to anyone about it. I was trying all of the Christian relationship tricks I could find, and they just didn’t work. What was there to say?
Vicky and I talked less and less frequently, the unspoken disagreements haunting our conversations more with each passing year. One time, when we did talk, Vicky posed a hypothetical question, “If I find someone I want to be with for the rest of my life… will you come to the wedding?”
I head a ready answer, one I had rehearsed during countless sermons, “No. I love you, but I can’t support non-biblical marriages.”
My answer felt like sticky, gauzy spiderwebs coming out of my mouth, and gummed up the conversation. The ease we had always felt together vanished.
I could sense Vicky deflating on the other end of the phone line. “How could you love me but refuse to come to my wedding? I just don’t understand.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I had no words of consolation. This time, the blow had come directly from me.
This was the moment we had feared for years, the thing we had tried to avoid, the inevitable dividing line in our relationship. The thing our friendship couldn’t overcome.
I had expected it, I had rehearsed that line in my head countless times. But when I said it, it felt more inauthentic than anything I had said in my life. “I love you, but…” Is there a single satifying way to end that sentence? I began to wonder. I finally started to ask myself some questions:
Why shouldn’t I go to the wedding of my closest friend? Aren’t we supposed to “rejoice with those who rejoice”?
Are beliefs really the most important thing? Even if they are right?
Are my beliefs right?
I looked at my marriage, the one grounded in all of the beliefs I had grown up with and clung to, the relationship with a man who had taken vows to love me for the rest of our lives, the one that caused me much more grief than joy on any given day. I compared it to my friendship with Vicky—the easy comradery, the love that we had for each other that had held us together until… Until now? I wasn’t sure what came next, but I knew our friendship was in more danger than it had ever been.
Vicky reached across the growing tension and came to visit me. Once she arrived, her presence was like that essential gear in the machinery of my being. Things started falling into place, emotions began moving and making sense of the world. And one day, while we were sitting and talking, she prodded, gently, “Amy, are you happy?”
I didn’t speak because I began crying immediately. Tears came that day that I’d previously only shed at night after Josh was asleep. I cried for the hopes that had never been fulfilled. I cried for the unanswered prayers. I wept over my lonely heart. Vicky reached over, held my hand, and cried with me.
That was it. That was what I needed. She didn’t have a solution or an answer, she was just there.
I filed for divorce. And, while my faith community didn’t condemn it, few people in it were as supportive as Vicky was. When they heard my story, many people nodded and conceded that sometimes, even divorce is warranted. Vicky reminded me that I deserved better, that love could be better, and that I was doing the right thing because I was doing what I needed to do. Her unconditional love was my guiding star as I divorced and ventured off the map I had always followed for my life.
I began to realize that my friendship with my “unsaved” best friend had taught me something that thousands of hours in the pew had not: what love really looks like. Maybe that was something we’d known all along, in those times when we didn’t know what to say about the grief of our lives. When her parents divorced, when she came out. We weren’t at a loss for what to do, we just did what we knew how to do—we knew how to be together. It was time to stop second-guessing the rightness of it.
A few years later, Vicky did get married. And I did go to the wedding. I was overwhelmed with gratitude that I hadn’t missed that moment because I’d gotten in my own way, or because Vicky had lost patience with me. I cried then, too, as I raised a glass to Vicky and to love at the reception:
“When I look back on what it has taken to keep our friendship together, I’m astonished by the amount of time and effort we’ve poured into it. I look at the boxes of letters in childish scrawl that would take days or maybe even weeks to read through. I think of the car rides and flights back and forth. No one could say it hasn’t been a lot of work to keep our friendship going. But, at the same time, there have been few things in my life that have felt so easy and straightforward. Neither of us ever had any doubts that it was worth it. When faced with an opportunity to enjoy one another’s company, the answer has always been a resounding YES. The obstacles to our friendship that may have seemed daunting some years have faded. Now, after half a lifetime of friendship, what stands out is simply the love we have for one another and the joy we have in each other’s company.
“That is what I have learned from my friendship with Vicky: that when love is present, those obstacles really are just passing phantoms, all fright and no real substance. The guest might go first, or maybe the ghost will, and in time we’ll forget the argument or even laugh about it. Love—real love—never fails.”
Today, we joke that we’ve switched places—she’s now a married homeowner who complains about taxes, and I’m the wild child divorcee who questions everything religious. Our beliefs have shifted, mine more than hers. They’re now more closely aligned than they have been in years. That’s important, but we both know that they’re not what holds our friendship together. Love is. Always has been. Always will be.
This story is a subplot in the memoir I’m writing, Pious Magic. You can learn more about Pious Magic and my other writing (and sign up for news about my work) at AmyLFarnham.com/writing/