Now & Then: The Friendships That Last a Lifetime

In fifth grade, I met a girl named Jessica Gilligan.

Her mom taught in a neighboring town, but I would see her after school because my dad was a teacher too. Jessica would hang out in the hallways while she waited for someone to take her to her mom. Somewhere between munching on Doritos, drinking Sprite, and passing the time in those hallways, a friendship began.

I had no idea that more than thirty years later, when my daughter turned one, Jessica would still be part of my life. That her three girls would hang out with my three. That she would become one of the people who could look at the woman I am now and still see every version of the girl I used to be.

Yin-yang signs, Adidas slides, and a movie we watched on repeat

Through middle school, Jessica and I collected yin-yang signs, daisies, and anything we could find at Claire's. We wore Adidas slides, which I still love to this day, and thought Bath & Body Works Cucumber Melon was the height of sophistication.

Along with our friends Ashley and Roxanne, we watched the movie Now and Then over and over again. We weren't exactly a trio. We were our own little group of four.

That movie found so many of the tender places in girls our age. Four friends standing in that delicate space between childhood and everything that came next, still riding bikes and having sleepovers, but starting to wonder about boys and college and the women they might someday become.

We were doing the same thing.

Cookie dough, four-wheelers, and sleepovers that felt like everything

At Jessica's house, her mom let us eat cookie dough and pepperoni. Pepperoni was never allowed at my house because my mom told me it caused cancer, so I survived on black olives instead. Jessica's dad ran a hunting plantation and had a Gator, so four giddy little girls would pile onto it, ride through the woods, say cuss words where our parents couldn't hear us, and dream about our future lives.

Ashley's dad was a pecan farmer, so we rode four-wheelers through the pecan groves all day on Saturdays after staying up far too late the night before.

Roxanne lived right in the middle of town, and her house became one of our gathering places. There was always cookie dough there too, which may explain why I still keep a frozen package of it in my freezer at all times. It was at Roxanne's house that I first played spin the bottle and had to kiss my first boy. We had countless sleepovers there, filling our nights with secrets and conversations that felt like the most important conversations anyone had ever had.

Roxanne and I even fought over a boy in seventh grade. I have no idea what happened to him. It makes me laugh now, because whatever went on between us felt so significant at the time. Everything feels enormous when you're thirteen. But something we let matter so much then doesn't matter at all now.

My friendship with Roxanne does.

My dad taught gifted classes at our school, and all three of the girls were his students, which always made coming to my house especially fun. We lived in the city, so there were no Gators or four-wheelers. Instead we did makeup, watched movies, dressed up, and staged elaborate photo shoots with disposable cameras, then waited days to find out whether any of the pictures were actually good.

We wondered who would leave, who would stay, who would fall in love, and what each of us would become.

Our lives didn't turn out exactly as we imagined

In the movie, the four girls grow up and live very different lives. Teeny becomes a Hollywood actress. Samantha becomes a writer. Roberta becomes a doctor. Chrissy stays in their hometown, builds a family, and prepares to welcome a baby. Their lives don't unfold exactly the way their twelve-year-old selves might have predicted. But when they come back together, the years fall away, and they remember who they were before life asked them to become so many other things.

Our lives didn't turn out exactly as we imagined either.

Jessica now works in technology for a school. Ashley became a counselor. Roxanne works in the arts and lives in California. I even lived in Los Angeles for a season, and it still feels strange that the city has stayed such a regular part of our lives. We travel there often for Paul's work, and somehow I became the friend who ended up at the Golden Globes and the Emmys and on national television, not because of anything I accomplished, but because of my husband's talent.

Sometimes, in the middle of those glamorous nights, or just driving through a city that once felt impossibly far away, I think about the girls. Cookie dough. Disposable cameras. Cucumber Melon. Four-wheelers. The little girl who had no idea where life would take her. The friends who knew me long before red carpets, marriage, motherhood, heartbreak, and healing became part of my story.

Life carried all four of us in different directions, but it never completely carried us away from one another.

An old friendship doesn't always need constant maintenance

Jessica and I haven't talked every day for the past thirty years. There have been seasons when we were deeply connected and years when we mostly kept up through social media. But an old friendship doesn't always need constant maintenance to stay rooted.

Recently, Jessica's father passed away. At his funeral, someone who had watched us grow up together at church, and later become co-captains of our dance line, the Dazzlers, told me she had loved watching our friendship through the years. No matter how far apart we'd been, she said, we always picked up right where we left off.

We have.

The friends who show up when life falls apart

During one of the hardest seasons of my life, when Paul and I were going through a painful time and I was pregnant and trying to figure out what I was going to do, Jessica became one of my strongest prayer warriors. She came to my house and simply sat beside me on the couch. I didn't have to explain the whole story or give her the background. She knew the issues I'd carried since childhood. She knew who I'd been as a teenager. She understood the layers beneath the moment because she'd known me before so many of those layers existed. She sat with me. She prayed with me. She sent me worship songs that carried me through some of my hardest moments.

Jessica isn't the only one who has shown up in the moments that mattered.

When Harris was born, Roxanne came over just to spend time with me. There was something so tender about watching someone who had known me as a little girl sit beside me as I became a mother. And I'll never forget running into Ashley at the grocery store in the weeks leading up to Harris's birth. She looked at me and said she'd be there if I needed anything. It was a simple sentence, but I believed her, because it came from someone who had known and loved me for most of my life.

These women have known me as a little girl with big dreams, as a teenager trying to figure out who she was, and as a grown woman navigating marriage, motherhood, heartbreak, and healing. Old friends don't only know the life you're living now. They remember the bedroom you grew up in, your parents' rules, the songs you played on repeat, the boy you thought you'd never get over, and the dreams you whispered at sleepovers.

They knew you before the career, the marriage, the children, the accomplishments, the disappointments, and the healing. They know how you became her.

Nobody knows me like they know me

Sometimes I'll be driving down the road when a song comes on and takes me straight back to Jessica. I'll text her, and a flood of memories comes rushing in, like the time I played Jewel's "You Were Meant for Me" over and over on my portable CD player for the entire drive to Washington, D.C., because I was completely obsessed with it.

Years later, I sat in a theater in Los Angeles watching Ben Rector perform live for the first time. When he sang "Old Friends," my eyes filled with tears at one line: "Nobody knows me like they know me." No one else remembers those exact versions of us, because no one else was there.

I deeply love the friendships I've made in college, adulthood, motherhood, and ministry. God has placed extraordinary women in my life at exactly the moments I needed them. But I'll admit that one of my favorite people will always be my fifth-grade best friend.

After Jessica's father died, one of the girls started a group text so we could tell her we were sorry and that we loved her. Seeing all four names together again sent me into a tailspin of memories.

No matter how far we travel, where we live, what careers we choose, or how much life changes us, there will always be people who knew us then. People who can look at who we've become and still see the little girls riding through the woods, eating cookie dough, wearing Adidas slides, and wondering what their lives might someday hold.

Look at the women those girls became

When I watched Now and Then as a girl, I was captivated by the possibility of the future. Which girl would I become? Would I fall in love? Would we stay friends forever? Watching it now, I understand that the real beauty of the story was never about which girl became the actress or the writer or the doctor or the mother.

The beauty was that they came back. They returned to one another carrying all the lives they'd lived in between, gathered not as the girls they once were, but as the women those girls had become.

Maybe that's one of the sweetest gifts of getting older. You look at the girls who once sat beside you dreaming about the future, and instead of wondering who you'll become, you get to say: look at us. Look at everything we survived, the lives we built, the women we became. I'm so proud of us.

Life rarely turns out exactly the way we imagined it would when we were twelve. There are beautiful surprises, devastating losses, prayers we never expected to pray, and dreams that arrive in forms we could never have predicted. But if we're fortunate, somewhere along the way we still have a friend who remembers us with Dorito dust on our fingers and Sprite in our cups. A friend who sits beside us on the couch when life falls apart, who comes over when we become a mother, who offers to be there before we even ask, who knows when to pray and when to send a worship song and when no explanation is necessary.

A friend who knew us then, and still loves us now.

Who are your girls?

So, to the women reading this: who are your girls? Who knew you then? Who remembers the bedroom you grew up in, the music you loved, the ridiculous arguments you had, and the dreams you once believed were impossible? Maybe today is the day to reach out and simply say, "Hi. I was thinking about you."

And to the younger girls who may someday read this: be kind to yourselves, and please be kind to one another. The stupid little arguments that feel so important right now won't matter when you're sitting together at your daughter's first birthday party or showing up for one another through the hardest seasons of life. The boy you fought over may eventually become someone whose last name you can't even remember. But if you take care of one another, the friendship might still be there.

One day, you may look around at the girls who knew you then, see the women you've all become, and say the words I now understand so well: I'm so proud of us.