Soul Friends: What Every Woman Needs to Grow in Her Faith

By Leslie Parrott

Are you missing out on one of the most transforming means to a deeper and more vibrant faith? In Soul Friends, Dr. Leslie Parrott explores the intimate stages of a woman's spiritual journey while showing you how soul friendships can deepen and enlarge your faith.

God brings us soul-friends to help in our spiritual journey, sometimes in predictable places:  small groups, friendships, and mentors. But they’re sometimes found in places we don’t expect—these “hidden guides” are people, past or present, whose role in our life may even be hidden from them, but nevertheless, have a deep impact on our growth and vitality. Whether it’s a hidden guide, a member of a small group, or a friend we’ve had for years, these soul-friends all hold the potential to embody grace that enables us to take a next step in the unfolding journey of our faith.

Leslie reveals how every woman traverses four stages of spiritual growth—quest, calling, crisis, and communion – again and again.  And whatever stage you find yourself traveling right now, you need soul friends to help you move forward

When we seize the initiative to connect, together we will form a part of the deep communion that is the sisterhood of the traveling saints, journeying together in our desire to know God, serve him, and love him more deeply. Through story, poem, and reflection, Leslie Parrott reminds each of us of the incredibly intimate, intricate, faith-forming work God does in us through the gift of the women he places in our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Mar 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9780310563402

Leslie Parrott

Dr. Leslie Parrott is a marriage and family therapist and codirector with her husband, Dr. Les Parrott, of the Center for Relationship Development at Seattle Pacific University. She is the author of First Drop of Rain and God Made You Nose to Toes, and coauthor with her husband of several bestselling books, including the Gold Medallion Award–winner Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts. Leslie is a columnist for Today’s Christian Woman and has been featured on Oprah, CBS This Morning, CNN, and The View, and in USA Today and the New York Times. Leslie lives in Seattle with her husband and their two sons. Visit LesandLeslie.com

Book preview

part one

quest

Our desire to live questingly — to taste all that life has to offer of love, friendship, meaning, and adventure — runs deep. In so many ways it has less to do with our fantasy about what the world holds for us than it does with our dreams about what we bring to the world. We long to find buried treasure; but even more, we long to be a treasure for those who know and love us, our soul friends.

chapter 1

adventure club

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike What’s next, Papa?

ROMANS 8:15

Ellie, the scrappy tomboy in Disney’s movie Up, has the brave heart of an explorer. Inspired by tales of adventure, she dreams of journeying to Paradise Falls in South America. It’s like America, but South, she says with her adorable gap-toothed lisp. What I love most about Ellie is that no sooner has this dream-quest been birthed in her soul than she forms a club. When Carl, the neighborhood boy (who is shy and timid but whose heart also shares the dream for great exploration), wanders into her clubhouse, she immediately initiates him into the club, a ceremony completed by the pinning of a grape soda badge onto his chest. This initiation promptly costs him a broken arm (when he attempts to retrieve a lost balloon by walking across a precarious ceiling beam in a dilapidated old house), as if to underscore the true risk involved in an adventurous life.

Getting to Paradise Falls is Ellie’s Quest. And yet, true to her gender, Ellie does not see this as an autonomous task, to be accomplished independently. She doesn’t view this as her heroic moment to shine, but rather, she instinctively leans into the bonds of connection and relationship in the face of the challenge. Sociologists tell us that when it comes to any great challenge in life, women are eager to join the journey with each other, while men instinctively want everyone to see how they can go it alone. We have been uniquely hardwired by God to reach out before we forge ahead into our wild blue yonder. For us, as women, it really is "off we go!"

Well, as you probably already know, Ellie and Carl’s little adventure club eventually led to the greatest adventure of their lives: a marriage. And in time, Ellie’s Quest expanded to include the dream of having a baby. I love the scene of the young couple happily stretched out on a picnic blanket placed atop a grassy hillside. It is clearly a favorite spot they have visited on countless happy occasions. On this day they are studying the blue sky together, finding recognizable shapes in the cloud formations, when suddenly, for Ellie, all of the clouds shapes have rearranged themselves into babies. At first surprised, Carl soon joins in the joy of this new phase of Ellie’s Quest.

But as the story unfolds, we discover that Ellie does not have the joy of giving birth to her own baby. And furthermore, she never makes it to Paradise Falls. Countless little setbacks and crises along life’s road stymie the couple’s quest . . . until eventually illness and age steal Ellie away, even as they are on the verge of attaining the funds for their much-dreamed-of destination. What she did have along the way, however, was the adventure of loving and being loved. And here is the crux of it: Ellie’s dream, although technically unfulfilled, expanded far beyond her, eventually transforming the lives of Carl and a neglected little wilderness explorer, Russell. Ellie’s life had moved beyond the fulfillment of her Quest, as ours must, and into the place of Calling, Crisis, and transforming, true Communion.

Whether our dreams (that form our own personal Quest) come true is not the point of this journey so much as the way God uses our lives to accomplish his purposes in ways that surpass our imagining. The truth is, it’s the loving and being loved along the way which transforms us so completely that even the unfulfilled dreams become our pathway to joy rather than an occasion for sorrow. Our Quest, our Calling, and our Crisis always take place in the Communion of saints, chosen and gathered around us by our heavenly Father’s hand.

Listen to these words of Bishop Bardsley from an old spiritual classic:

When a soul sets out to find God it does not know whither it will come and by what path it will be led; but those who catch the vision are ready to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, regardless of what that following may involve for them. And it is as they follow, obedient to what they have seen, in this spirit of joyful adventure that their path becomes clear before them, and they are given the power to fulfill their high calling. They are those who have the courage to break conventionalities, who care not at all what the world thinks of them because they are entirely taken up with the tremendous realities of the soul and God.²

Oh, how I wish I could be there beside you right now holding a grape soda badge to safety-pin over your heart to mark this moment as an occasion of great consequence. Why? Because each one of us is invited into God’s Adventure Club. And isn’t grape soda the perfect symbol for true communion? Jesus tells us, I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you . . . the harvest is sure to be abundant . . . This is how my Father shows who he is — when you produce grapes, when you mature as my disciples (John 15:5, 8).

Sisters, adventure is out there! Your Quest can become an instrument through which God works his transformational art within you and the seemingly random bystanders in the context around you, whoever they might be. When you seize the initiative to connect, together you will form the deep communion that marks the soul friend.

soul souvenirs

1. What dreams (big or little) have played a part in your personal adventure or Quest? How have those dreams connected you to others in meaningful relationships?

2. How has God surprised you with an adventure you would never have dreamed of (or maybe even chosen)? What gifts or grief (or both) have you encountered in the adventure?

2. A quotation of Bishop Bardsley in Stuart and Brenda Blanch, eds., Learning of God: Readings from Amy Carmichael (Fort Washington, Pa.: Christian Literature Crusade, 1986), 69.

chapter 2

coffee clouds

I had some dreams; they were clouds in my coffee.

CARLY SIMON

Like any couple, Les and I did a lot of dreaming together before we got married. We had a shared heritage, shared values, and a shared vision for our future. We even had the same name. And during our seven years of dating we certainly had ample time to dream. One of the things we decided together was to live a healthy life, which included a commitment to good food, healthy habits, and regular exercise. One of these healthy habits was a commitment to go coffee-free. That sounded fine to me; I’d never even tasted coffee. Growing up in the age of percolators and church coffee in fellowship-sized urns, I had never felt its enticement.

We got married shortly after graduating from our university, and moved from our Midwestern roots to the West Coast, locating in Pasadena for graduate school. I quickly got a job on campus, and as the most recent hire I inherited the hospitality tasks, including making the coffee. But this West Coast coffee was like nothing I had been exposed to before. I was instructed to buy fresh-roasted coffee beans at a little roaster down the street, as well as vanilla beans to add to the mix, which would infuse the beans with even more flavor. And I was admonished to do some taste testing to make sure the results were of the best quality. Furthermore, I was to keep the coffee flowing all day. I quickly discovered coffee was a valued commodity to most of my colleagues, and its making could be elevated to an art. Intrigued, I began to drink it now and again at work.

Soon I became a coffee enthusiast, wholeheartedly embracing this warm, wonderful, energy-boosting drink. There was just one little hitch. Les. And our shared vision of a healthy lifestyle that had now become nothing more than clouds in my coffee. While it didn’t please Les, who called my new favorite drink Satan’s syrup just to razz me, I thank God that he was eventually able to graciously concede and allow me this diversion from our dream.

Letting go of dreams that have been a script to our quest for happily-ever-after is no easy task. Even the little details of our imagined bliss can become monumental disappointments to us. One of the myths we hold deeply is that if we love someone we will always feel the same way about things. I tell Les today that God was just preparing me to live in Seattle, where coffee is as central to the culture as clouds are (and I fit in nicely with my daily triple-shot latte). We recently celebrated our thirtieth anniversary, and with three decades of marriage behind us, it’s hard to imagine that something as incidental as drinking coffee could have threatened to create a rift. But every union contains plenty of potential catalysts for division.

More recently it’s not the coffee that has been the issue, but the cost. When Les opened our mail, he took a red Sharpie to the latest Visa bill, circled each and every Starbucks charge over the course of the month, and placed it front and center on my desk with a yellow sticky note simply asking, Really? To my mind each and every one of those charges was justified. Scanning the bill, I could see the faces of those I met with over warm cups of coffee. My weekly moms’ group; the college girls from church I signed up to mentor; the friends who shared cathartic moments of laughter or the ones who shed tears; the biweekly breakfast meetings over oatmeal and coffee with my mom and aunt. I see the quick drive-through stops with a carload of hungry boys after school, and the drinks that got me through long writing sessions for a recent deadline. Les, meanwhile, sees an inordinate amount of money being invested in a relatively luxurious and completely optional commodity.

No matter how deep the synchronicity of souls, there will always be gaps. True love wakes up every morning and recognizes the need to stretch stiff muscles that may even be sore from the work of loving the day before. We have to warm up our generosity of spirit and stretch into grace. We have to willingly take on the work of loving and being loved, giving it everything we’ve got. Happily ever comes only after you decide that loving is your quest, and that means stepping into life with someone whose view of coffee and costs and even clouds might be very different from your own.

soul souvenirs

1. When have you had to relinquish a part of your dream on your quest for happiness when you realized someone you love didn’t share it? How did that experience impact you?

2. When have you experienced the gift of someone stretching into grace, relinquishing a dream for your sake? How did that make you feel, and what have you learned from it?

chapter 3

flying