The New Girl

The New Girl

If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that.

As I slipped into the empty pew before the service, I sighed. Aaron and I were newlyweds, just graduated, and had moved to St. Cloud for our first “real” jobs. There had been a lot of change in a very short period of time, and knowing almost no one in the community, we were still finding our footing amid all the newness. A drummer for most of his life, Aaron had quickly been recruited for the worship team, and so here I sat alone, the new girl in the empty pew.

Until Katrina. Beautiful and poised far beyond her twentysomething age, she drew people to her like a magnet. And one Sunday, she blew into my otherwise empty pew and my life with an introduction, a twinkle in her eye, and an invitation to come sit with her, followed quickly by an invitation to join her Bible study on Tuesdays.

The rest, as they say, is history. I spent hundreds of Tuesdays with a group of fellow twentysomethings gathered around her kitchen table, wrestling with our faith, crying and celebrating over babies, marriages, school, careers, and everything else. Those formative years bonded us deeply, and we became spiritual sisters—women who loved one another fiercely and ran to one another’s rescue even as life tugged our daily routines in different directions.

I could not fathom the gift God was sending me when Katrina extended her invitation, and I’ve taken that lesson to heart. I try to be always on the lookout for women I jokingly call My New Best Friend. Because I was once the new girl, I now strike up conversations with new girls, trying to ease the awkwardness of being alone in a new place, inviting them into groups, and intentionally including them.

God’s girls are inviters—women who are kind and quick to reach out beyond our comfortable circles of established friendships, always looking to include the new girls.

— Julie

— Today’s Act of Friendship —

Ask God to help you be an inviter—especially if this is not a natural part of your personality—and strike up a conversation with a new girl.