Mark's Blog

What does it take to stay friends for forty years?  As those of you know who are my Facebook friends, Sherrylee and I have just spent the last three days with David and Malissa Rivoire and Wes and Glenna Harrison, our co-workers in Germany from 1971-1979.  It has been sixteen years ago since the three couples were together at the same time and place, although we occasionally bump into each other at the Pepperdine Bible lectures or some mission conference.  This wonderful weekend in Vermont has just made me stop and think about friendships, so, if you are interested, I’ll share some thoughts with you.

First of all, in many ways, the six of us are very unlikely friends. David and Wes met at York College, then transferred to Harding their junior year. The summer prior to that transfer they worked on Campaigns Northeast, which I was on for the second time in the summer of 1967. Wes and I decided to room together—and I don’t remember whose idea that was—and it doesn’t make any difference.

Dave met Malissa (I don’t remember those details) and Wes met Glenna and the dating dance started for both of them with all the ups and downs. All I remember was that Roy Orbison’s “Your Baby Doesn’t Love You Anymore” was a popular song around our dorm room.

The fall of our senior year, we guys began talking seriously about what we would do after graduation, and we started talking about doing mission work somewhere together. With some guidance from Dr. Joe Hacker, head of the Bible department at Harding then, we decided to go to Germany two years after graduation. The Rivoires, then married, spent those years in Houston, and the Harrisons married the summer after college graduation.

I was still doing Campaigns Northeast every summer. That summer of 1969, a cute girl named Sherrylee Johnson joined us in Scranton, PA for the last two weeks of the summer. That’s where our story starts!

On September 24, 1971, the Rivoires and Woodwards left Houston for Munich, Germany—the Harrisons would join us about 16 months later.  We spent two years in Munich and approximately six years planting a good church in Hanover, Germany. God blessed the work in Hanover, but our work as a team began to end—perhaps a natural conclusion for such organisms.

The Harrisons moved to Kaiserslautern to work with the American military church. Sherrylee and I began making plans to start a Christian international school in Stuttgart, but it all fell through suddenly and left us without support, so we returned to the States quickly and unexpectedly in 1979. The Rivoires stayed in Hanover another four years, then moved to the UK and worked with churches there for ten years.

Since then the Wes has taught at Columbia Christian and is now at Ohio Valley University. David has preached for the church in South Burlington VT for sixteen years. Sherrylee and I spent 22 years at Oklahoma Christian and now the last nine in Fort Worth with Let’s Start Talking.  So what does all this say about friendship?

• None of us were “soulmates”—those kinds of special friends that click at first sight and are on the same wavelength virtually all the time! We had to work at our friendships, but we did so because we had committed to each other for a season. Our years in Germany were not without conflict, sometimes serious conflict—often personality-driven, sometimes strategical—but we knew our little team was a little church and that we had to love each other because God had brought us together to do something together. So we did, until we felt that God had brought that season to its end.
• We learned the strength in diversity. As we worked together, we discovered that each couple attracted different types of people and worked in different ways with those people, BUT instead of insisting that all of us—because we were a team–work in one way or with one group of people, we figured out how to work together and bless each other’s individual gifts.  That was a hard lesson to learn, though.
• I learned that common experiences are what build relationships. Our experiences during eight years in Germany are the reason we met in Vermont.  And I believe that common experiences include common struggle, shared joy and pain, even mild embarrassment that those people know so much about me.  I often felt like we were married to our co-workers. I remember once thinking, we are really family, when I gave David the gynecologist’s report on Malissa that I had already heard from Sherry but that he had not received yet.
• Our common experiences continue to be our common concerns. When together, we talk about the people in Germany–who is faithful, who is struggling–and the church situations there.

What am I saying about friendship? Just this. It is not about finding perfect friends, soulmates, etc. If you are given such, you are doubly blessed. You should, rather, go ahead and invest the time and effort it takes with the people God has thrown you together with, commit to them, and resolve the inevitable conflicts so that there is no division among you. Then, after forty years, you will still be friends!