Why You Want Rubber-Gloves Kind of Friends + How to Find Them

I don’t like washing dishes. And it’s not really about the chore itself, or the time it takes, it’s that it makes the skin on my hands annoyingly tight and I can’t open my hands properly. When my fingertips get dry, those little cracks begin running in every which direction, everything I touch feels foreign, and all the things snag.

If you haven’t discovered how much nicer it is to wash dishes with rubber gloves, let me tell you what you’re missing. The water can be as hot as you like (scalding, which I’m convinced is a necessity), and you can feel the warmth through the gloves without having to temper the water to avoid getting burned. You can wash a whole sink full of dishes without getting your hands wet, and your hands don’t dry out.

Rubber gloves sort of friends

One morning as I gathered around a friend’s table with a few other ladies from our neighborhood, I thought about rubber gloves. Having friends who know the questions to ask and the things to pray for doesn’t make all the hard parenting things go away, but it does make them easier. Less likely to get under our skin. Less likely to derail us.

Like rubber gloves that protect your hands from the drying effect of dish soap, relationships can be a buffer between you and the road you’re walking.

There are days you could really use that buffer. Days when you

• Needed a good long cry but didn’t want a soul to know
• Thought you were the only one going through this
• Felt lonely and very alone
• Dismissed your pain because you didn’t want to be a burden
• Pushed yourself harder when you’re on the verge of burnout
• Didn’t feel beautiful and everything went wrong
• Had that thing eating at you and you didn’t know what to do with it
• Felt distant from God and needed to know that He hears you

We all have those days. And that’s why I’m so thankful God wired us with a fierce desire to do life with other people.

Hear the truth in Jennie Allen’s words in Find Your People: “When we don’t have a village of interconnected, consistent teammates in our lives, we feel invisible, and when we are left alone and unbothered, we become the worst version of ourselves” (p.119-20).

I know it’s true for me. When I don’t let others draw me out, call me out, and expect me to show up fully, I withdraw. I hide. I sit in self-pity. I feed discontentment. I compare and become self-critical and prideful. It’s ugly.

I need people who care about what I’m going through and also care too much to let me stay there.

I need people who are willing to be silent even when they could give all the best-intentioned advice, who encourage me to seek Jesus instead of just making me feel better, and really mean it when they ask how I’m doing.

I need people whose presence in my life makes the sweet things extra sweet and the hard things less defeating.

I need people who stand in the gap and fight for me through prayer, even without me asking for it.

And if I had to take a guess, I’d bet that you need that buffer-between-you-and-life kind of friends too.

I think of Moses who had Aaron and Hur to step in and hold up his arms when his strength depleted (Exodus 17:12). And I think of you, facing that hard thing on the road you’re walking. I envision others coming alongside you, lending their strength, their encouragement, their prayers, and their presence in the moments when you wonder how you can keep going. That’s what I want for you, I want you to want it for yourself too.

But how do we get there when we don’t have those people yet?

1—We get honest. Real honest.

We admit what we lack and name what we want. We don’t sugar-coat it, to ourselves or to God. God welcomes our authenticity. He’s not impressed with fancy words or long prayers. The real, never-changing truth is that He’s after your heart. He has been, He still is, and He always will be more concerned with the condition of your heart than what your life looks like on the outside.

So if you feel like you don’t know where to start when you pray, set aside the semantics and simply talk to Jesus. Bring Him your real. He can handle it. This is where you start.

2—We let people get close enough to know us.

When there’s distance, we can stay hidden. We can keep our hurts and our hard to ourselves. But that means we also have to shoulder it all ourselves. Friend, this is not the way it’s meant to be. Walking the hard roads alone is not the plan God has for you.

We’ve got to let others get real close to us. Close enough to walk a stretch of road with us. Close enough to know when we’re not OK, even when we say that we are. Close enough to know our neediness. Close enough to be a buffer.

3—We be a buffer for others.

Friendship is never more about you than her. It’s an I’ll-hold-you-up-and-you’ll-hold-me-up mutuality that grows us both and together makes us look more like Jesus. If you don’t have a buffer kind of friendship yet, begin being that for someone else.

Which of your friends needs to lean on your strength right now? Which of your friends needs to know that she isn’t too much and you’re not walking away? Which of your friends needs to know she can bring her real because you’re willing to bring yours first?

As Jess Johnston wrote in I’ll Be There (But I’ll Be Wearing Sweatpants, “Life is too beautiful and too terrible not to do it with people who truly know and love us” (p. 31).

4—We embrace the journey.

Rubber-glove-buffer-friendships don’t happen overnight. Jennie Allen highlights in Find Your People that the deepest kind of friendships are at least 200 together-hours in the making (p. 176). We all start somewhere, but no one of us have to stay where we are. We can begin building friendships that run deep and true and walk us together towards this life of mission that’s been our calling since the beginning of time. We can take one little step at a time. We can put our hand in God’s reassuringly big hand and walk with Him in the direction of life with people who know us, love us, and lend the protective barrier of their presence.

You can have rubber-glove-friendships. I believe it for you, and I’m praying these words over you today:

Jesus, I pray for the one who feels alone and unprotected from the weight of it all. She feels lonely and seems that it will always be this way. Show her that today doesn’t foreshadow tomorrow—that there is another way: a connected, protected, surrounded sort of way. Hear her prayer for people.

Would You help her get deep down into the grit of being real—with herself, but ultimately with You? Show her that vulnerability is a most precious gift—a door that opens to the relational depth her soul craves.

I pray, too, for the one who feels invincible. She’s been hurt, and she’s tried for so long to convince herself that she doesn’t need people that she almost believes it. She feels alone too. Touch tenderly the fractured places of her heart. Restore her hope, and fill her with a vision for what this life of together and invested and open could look like.

For all of us living in this great, wide world, show us that we weren’t meant to walk alone.

Amen.

May you be brave with Him,

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Wish you knew your IRL (in-real-life) neighbors?