JENNIFER J. CAMP

4 min read ⭑

We sit in the backyard, a fire blazing, though it’s not yet cold. We’ve skipped eating, even though it’s dinner time. At six p.m., the California sky has filtered from September’s deep blue to purple-gray. There are chairs for six, but tonight we are just three. It’s our first night meeting after a summer break, and we are excited to be together again. 

Holy Spirit, we invite you in.

We ask him to enter our space. How else can we open our hearts? How else can we trust ourselves, speak candidly, search for truth and accept nothing less? 

Without God’s help, even a twenty-year-old friendship like this can veer to superficiality — to perfunctory sharing that hurts more than helps — when we keep it safe, say only the polite things rather than the deeper dives into the realm of the heart.

How do I share, Lord? What do I say? How do I know in which direction to go?

An hour before my friends came over, I ran around the house, inside and out — using a plastic putty knife to scrub the cedar tree’s sticky resin off the fire pit chairs, snapping the pruning shears to clip the wilted gladiola stems blocking the garden path. Inside, I wiped down the kitchen counter and vacuumed up Fulton’s fur from the wood floors. As I cleaned, I prayed. 

Lord, open my heart. Guide me. Come in. Fill this place. 

Friendship has not come easily for me. Years of insecurity — of not feeling good enough, interesting enough or smart enough — made me silent. How do people talk and share so effortlessly? How do they speak as if people want to listen? How do they know they are okay?

It has been a long road, Lord. You have kept me so close.

Justin jokes about how many self-help books I have read and how curious I am about people — their ideas, inspiration, talents for creating and adventuring, and just being who they are. But, with all of my reading, I have found no book will fix me — no knowledge, ideology, formula or rules. Only love has the power to go deep enough to heal what hurts. Only love can destroy lies and make a person brand new.

I am captivated by people who know they are loved. They’re the ones who can love who they are. 

When the doorbell rings, and my friends come, one by one, I swing wide the door and hold them close. These friendships have been hard-fought. We know the language of striving and pretending. We understand the dangers of busyness and hiding from each other what is going on.

We know how to be kind — the polite, careful and surface-level sort of kind. But now, after twenty years of friendship, we find we don’t have patience for that. When we are together, we need to be more than kind. We need to love with both tenderness and fierceness. We must be raw and vulnerable — stripped of all pretension and striving. We need to believe, without a doubt, that we are loved.

Lord, it begins with You. You teach us what it means to love.

The fire crackles. We can hear each other’s feet shifting in the dirt when we pause to listen to our Father’s voice as we pray. One of my friends loves birds, and just before dusk, California Towhee and Chusnut-backed Chickadees sang brightly in the olive and cedar trees above our heads. But now quiet settles around us. It is just our voices, the three friends who love how Jesus loves them — sisters, whom Jesus shows are also young girls, free and strong, running laughing through creeks in the sun.

As night falls, our voices carry. It has been two hours, and we are leaning in, practicing telling stories we were always meant to speak. “I am raw with you. I will not hide from you. I will let you fight for my heart as I lay down my sword. And then I will pick mine up as I hear your story and fight for you.”

And how can anyone be genuine, kind, honest and authentic without You, God? 

We depend on Jesus’ courage to be courageous and on Jesus’ kindness to try to say what is true. We are flawed, weak, loved and held, and we promise to try our best to love each other the way Jesus did. We won’t get it right, but we vow to keep trying.

Oh, Jesus, you’ve brought me so far. Show me more — about friendship, about sisterhood, about love, about belonging. Let’s go all the way, all the way home.

Friend, will you tell me a story of friendship? Of broken hearts mended and strong? Of strength brought low and hope returned? Of what is possible, even in the dark?

Pick Up Your Feet

Let me adjust how I see things,
your standing there with armor on.
We journey first to shallow places.
Say please and thank you.
Wear the straight seam.
Seek the pedigree.
Before our edges roughen
and we walk (I love how
my shoulders touch
yours) towards lands
we’ve never seen
and always known
all the way,
all the way
home.

Jennifer Camp is a poet and listener who delights in investigating the deeper places of the heart. She founded Gather Ministries with her husband, Justin, and manages Loop Collective, a community for women who reject complacency and pursue connection with God. She writes on Substack at Jensen Road.

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