Unexpected Pain

I've only just arrived here at our new base in England, but the thought of friendship is already on my mind. Leaving Germany was more painful than I expected for reasons I hadn't anticipated.

See, when we moved to Germany after Tim got stationed at Spangdahlem AB, I had a positive view of settling in and making friends. In the short few months we had been at Keesler AFB in Mississippi I had made a good friend and I didn't anticipate things being any different at a new base. But it didn't take long for me to change my mind. With people leaving all the time, the social landscape was always changing and it unnerved me. In the five years I was there, I would meet people that I really liked and hit it off with, just to be told that they only had a few days/weeks/months until they moved. A few stayed a year or two, but everyone, even the chaplains who held our base church service together, moved on. I decided that wasn't the life for me. I withdrew, with the very conscious intention of not making friends.

Along the way, I made friends anyway. Jasmine became my closest friend at Spang, and there were numerous others that were friends though not close ones. When these friends that I strove to remain distant from left, I would often make a point of not being around when they said good-bye. That was my way of reinforcing my inner feeling that I didn't care. If I didn't invest anything, there was no way to get hurt.

Wrong.

It turns out, now that it was my turn to say good-bye, that the one person I loved there, Jasmine, made my leaving sweet. It hurts to part from friends, but the parting is also a comfort because the fact that there is pain means there is love and it's being loved that makes us matter. I cried to leave Jasmine, and she cried when I left. That doesn't hurt me so much now, but it does touch my heart and fill me with good feelings and the glow of warm memories.

The pain I feel concerning people at Spang is from those who didn't care that I left. That's the way I wanted it, and now that decision hurts me more than the loss of loved friends would have hurt me. While an acquaintance meant something to me, in my rather lonely and lowly life in Germany, I meant nothing to them. I was a blip on their radar screen, but they were all I knew as friends in those years (besides Jasmine). There are several people from church (that I would have considered to be distant friends) who didn't bother to say good-bye, even though they knew it was my last Sunday and they were at church too. That hurts. And I take blame for it.

I've learned my lesson. The pain of not being cared about, in retrospect, isn't worth the saved "pain" of parting with a beloved friend. A full life is one lived without all the boundaries we tend to put up to protect ourselves. I refuse to live like that again.