Hi, everyone! This is Maisha Johnson, CoCo member, ACWC liaison, and glad to be a guest blogger for the day. I’ve been going back and forth trying to decide what to blog about. I feel like I’ve missed out on discussing one simple topic in a spiritual context – friendship. I’m sitting here trying to write a birthday card for one of my very best friends, and as I reflect on six years of friendship I find myself wondering why something that’s so important in women’s lives hasn’t come up more often in the many times I’ve been in circles of Christian women.

Unfortunately, I didn’t attend Brianne’s workshop on friendship at the NNPCW Leadership Event, but I still managed to gain a lot of perspective on it at the event. Perhaps the strangest part of spending those few days with the wonderful women I met there was saying our good-byes – and with them the words “nice meeting you!”

Really? I stopped and thought about it every time I said those words to someone or they said them to me. Had I really only just met these women with whom I’d laughed and prayed and felt remarkably comfortable? Even the ones I’d known before the Leadership Event, I’d technically met only a couple of times. But the bond between us was instant and unmistakable. What is it exactly that brought us so close together over the course of just a few days? There were some people with whom I hardly had anything in common – we asked about one another’s majors, and found that while I’m studying Creative Writing, she’s into Biology. Or that I’m from the west coast, and she was born and raised in the South. Or that I’m liberal, and she’s conservative. Yet we managed to find enough in common to form a friendship.

Maybe the word “friend” is used pretty loosely these days. I confess that many of my “friends” on websites like facebook.com are people that I hardly know. But when I returned from the Leadership Event to find that I had several new “friends” on the facebook and that all were women I’d met at the event (we even created an NNPCW facebook group – you should join if you haven’t already!), I definitely felt like I was reconnecting with old friends. Perhaps that’s the effect of coming together in the context of a group like NNPCW, and knowing that if we have nothing else in common, at least we know that we are all sisters in Christ. At the Leadership Event I learned that friendship can cross geographical lines, generational lines, and any other boundaries as long as people are open-minded and willing to love others regardless of who they are. That’s the joy of being with a group of people like the wonderful women of NNPCW.

So I’ll end this with a reminder that there’s one week left to apply for CoCo, the Coordinating Committee of NNPCW (apply at http://www.pcusa.org/nnpcw/ ). This will only be my second year as a member, but already I can hardly wait to attend the fall CoCo meeting, see my CoCo friends, and seize the opportunity to build new friendships with the new members. I'd love to discuss this more with anyone who has thoughts on it (on the forum, perhaps? http://nnpcw.forumsplace.com ), or who knows any helpful Biblical passages that may apply to friendship.