Beth Jarvis Silliman is the team leader of the Globalscope Tübingen campus ministry in Germany, which makes her pretty knowledgeable about meeting new people and developing relationships. Here she shares a story of meeting and making a new friend at Unterwegs, and how God has been working in that relationship:

Making new friends can be scary, but often this situation sneaks up on us. We find ourselves in a new location, new job, new church and suddenly we’re trying to remember the art of friendship. This is the place where many new students find themselves. In high school, friendships happened because everyone was from the same village. Now, at the University of Tübingen, you are one in 27,000 students. This means you can choose your friends, and this choice can be scary.

In my experience, the only thing that makes this less scary is if you’ve had good experiences in the past. This is the reason why I still sincerely want to meet new people who come to Tübingen every year. I’ve made great friendships in the past this way, and even though there may be some awkward moments initially, and there may be some rejections, I know that I will become friends with some new people. And we will form an “us” and this “us” will be a strong and powerful thing.

Globalscope campus minister Beth Silliman, in front in pink, and her good friend Laura, at left in white, pose with other friends from Unterwegs at the ministry’s end-of-the-year awards show in Tübingen, Germany.

Last October I met Laura in the university cafeteria. She was there by herself so we invited her to our table, which had become an Unterwegs table. And so she met Unterwegs that day. We hung out the next week. The next month, she came to our Thanksgiving dinner. We kept hanging out. And suddenly, there’s “us” singing in the Unterwegs Christmas choir. The friendship continued. Then there’s “us” making soup together for our Soup Party in March. There’s “us” hanging out on vacation with other Unterwegs students at a Christian retreat in August.

This October, Laura and I wanted to celebrate our friendship anniversary. We cooked dinner that night for another friend. That night Laura told me that earlier that day she had gone to that same cafeteria with other Unterwegs friends to meet new people.

“I thought, ‘How did Beth do this last year?’ And then I did it just like you did with me,” she said. “I met new people and they were really cool. And I think they are going to come to Unterwegs.”

And there’s the key: We don’t just try to meet new people because we’re all about numbers. We want to meet new people because we have experienced community. We know it to be good. And this encourages us to share it with others and to reproduce it every year in new and fun ways.

This is what I’ve learned from Laura and value in our friendship. It’s such a good friendship that it leads us both to keep responding, but not just to each other. We keep inviting others to join “us.” These pictures of “us” become a strong and powerful reminder that God is working. This continual friendship began first with Him, who called us into friendship. And because of this “us,” suddenly making new friends isn’t as scary.