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<strong>I found an old friend this past week. Thanks to Facebook, of course.</strong>

"Finding" someone on Facebook is relatively easy to do, and therefore it's a relatively common to hear about. On the surface, this might diminish some of the magic, at least in the telling of the story. It's not like I hired a private investigator to track my friend down. I just had to think for a few days before I could remember her married name. You can yawn if you want.

But when you haven't been in touch with someone for a decade, and suddenly you're communicating again, and that contact is making you examine and think about a huge chunk of yourself and your past, it's a big deal. Finding Jen this week has been a big, exciting deal.

I have to confess, I hadn't thought about Jen in years. But out of nowhere, these past few weeks, she's been on my mind. I think in part it's because I've been feeling a hole of sorts in my life—a girlfriend-shaped hole that can only be filled by one person who really gets you, and is always ready (by "always" I mean every day) to hear the latest and greatest or most miniscule and ridiculous parts of your life. I have lots of good friends, but it's been almost a year since I've had that kind of friend.

So, my soul has been hungry for a friend. That hunger has naturally made me think about the people in my past who have been that kind of friend to me. And that made me wonder what the "qualifications" for such a friend might be.

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When it gets down to it, I think my quest for a friend mirrors my life quest and the whole point behind this blog: I want to be comfortable in my halfway to normal state, and I want to have people around me who  <em>get</em> and accept who and where I am. This is how I put it in response to the comment Jen left on my previous post, <a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/?p=187">Where to get some happiness</a>:
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Jen, I think it was in writing various blog posts that I started thinking about you again, after so many years. You most likely came to mind because you were always one of those rare people who seemed to GET and accept my halfway to normal state--perhaps even before I did, myself.</em></p>

<h3>One foot in one world, one in another</h3>
My own particular halfway to normal-ness takes form in many aspects of my life, but the struggle between the spiritual and secular worlds has always been most prominent. In some instances, I think the split is perceived—the two worlds aren't actually that different; my mind is simply playing tricks on my heart. At other moments, though, there's no doubt that the divide between the worlds is very real, and I'm caught in between.

The struggle and its connection to my friendships began when I was a teenager. I went to a public high school and didn't want to be pegged as overly religious, so I kept that part of who I was in check. Then I went to a Christian college, and was amazed at how freeing it was to have that spiritual part of you accepted, and even assumed.

Sort of freeing, that is. Until you realize that some of the assumptions being made are not ones you want to claim. And then you realize other assumptions are ones you can't rightly claim. You're really not as "good" as everyone thinks you are or expects you to be. Suddenly, you realize, the foundation for your facade has been poured.

It was at that particular moment in time that I met Jen, the summer after my sophomore year of college. We were living in a big house together on the Jersey Shore (a story for another time). She was perhaps the first Christian friend I could be fully myself with. And although she went to school in Pittsburgh and I was in Grand Rapids, we made the long drive to visit one another several times, and wrote weekly postcards to stay close and generally feel less alone in the world.

Yes, that's the kind of thing people did back in the early 1990s to stay in touch, when they couldn't afford big long distance phone bills and didn't know  a thing about email. Fifteen years later, though, we find one another on Facebook, soak up ambient awareness on Twitter, and find new ways to be halfway to normal together, again. And I'm very thankful.