Introducing Friends & Sisters

In the opening episode of the Friends and Sisters Podcast, hosts Tina Boesch and Paige Keeton invite listeners into an honest and hope-filled conversation about friendship. Drawing from their own stories, they unpack the beauty and challenges of cultivating meaningful relationships as women—especially in seasons marked by busyness and loneliness. Together, they consider how technology shapes the way we connect and turn to Scripture to explore God’s design for friendship. This episode sets the foundation for a journey modeled after Jesus’s own, reminding us that Christian friendship is a gift meant to point us toward Christ and draw us closer to one another. 

Key Bible passage: 1 John 4:7-11 

LINKS 

Friends and Sisters Bible study

Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community

CSB Women’s Study Bible

Hosted by Tina Boesch and Paige Clayton Keeton. 

 CONNECT WITH US! 

Friends and Sisters is a podcast from Lifeway Women.    

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Welcome to the Friends and Sisters Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

I'm Tina Bosch. And I'm Paige Keaton, and in this podcast, we'll reflect on how to cultivate deep, Christ-centered relationships with one another.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Whether you're new to your relationship with Jesus or have walked with him for years, this podcast will remind you that you have a place in God's family, and we really hope it's going to inspire you to become a better sister and friend. Yes. Yes. Paige, you and I have been friends for oh a minute. We have. And so I'm excited that we get to talk about this together, that we get to do this together. You too. But some of the women who may be listening may not know you. So can you introduce yourself? Tell us, tell us what you do. Sure. I can tell a few things about me.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

So I've been at Lifeway 20 years now, and I get the privilege of working with our authors. I get to lead our author relations for Lifeway Women, and I also am I get to lead, I'm part of the events team as well, and get to do the destination events, so touring and cruising, that kind of thing. Somebody's got to do that. And then also I on the side uh went back and got my master's and I am a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Yes, you can't do that. So I've been counseling about eight years now, just on the side, and absolutely love it. Love working with women. I work so I work with women in you know life with women's side, and then I work with women individually in the counseling office. It was so inspiring to me when you went back to do your degree.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Because I love that at that stage in your life, you're like, I'm ready to do a new thing. It was in my 40s, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

I was all that experience, all that time working with people led to a new calling. Yeah. For of in this season of your life specifically.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

And anyone that says to me in their forties, I want to do something diff different, I'm like, go do it. Like, go do it. Do it. I have never regretted doing it. It took forever, but I never I don't regret doing it. Totally worth it. Yeah, so tell me about you. What do you do here at Louis?

SPEAKER_02 2:00

I manage our women's Bible study team. And so I get to work with the team that makes the Bible studies.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Yes, you do.

SPEAKER_02 2:06

And I love the scripture. Um, it's been the source of life for me for honestly almost all my life. I'm the daughter of a pastor who was an incredible teacher, and also was um was a man who lived what he taught on in the home. And that has shaped how the degree to which I love scripture because I've seen it lived out in our home pretty much my whole life long.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

We're gonna see that, your love of scripture, as we go across this, these six episodes podcast that goes along with our friends and sisters study we're doing.

SPEAKER_02 2:43

And so um So I'm I I'm definitely at that stage of my life. I mean, y'all, I'm just transparently I'm in my fifties. That was a big transition for me. And I um I have realized that one of the things that I love about scripture the most is that there's never a time in your life that you'll read it and not learn something new. That I can continue to read the same passages that I read when I was 12, and that when I was 25, and that when I was 38-year-old mom underwater, not sleeping through the night, because my kids were up at all hours, and then when I was in my 40s, I can I can read those same passages and they will be fresh.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yes, they will.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

In every season of life. The word of God.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Yeah, so beautiful. So I want to get to know you though, Paige, as a friend. Okay. So what is there what is something that you wish people knew about you as a friend? Okay. What kind of a friend are you?

SPEAKER_01 3:37

What kind of friend am I? Okay. I think people like I have a big personality, I'm outgoing, I like to talk, I like to be in the middle of everything. But I also I think what people don't see about me off the bat is that I am a good listener. And that I do like to listen with the intent, with I listen with intent. Like, how can we it's the my counseling gift, I guess. Like, how can we fix this? How can I help you with a solution to whatever's going on if there's an issue? But I like I love to listen and learn people. I'm curious about people. Um so I don't know that that's evident about me right off the bat, but I love to to learn, listen and learn about what makes a person tick and how what they love and just curious. So how I ask you the same question. Tell tell me something. I do know you as a friend, I know what kind of friend you are, but if people are just if I was if I was just meeting you and you wanted me to know one thing about you that makes you a great friend, what is it?

SPEAKER_02 4:29

I don't know if it makes me a great friend, but I would definitely say I am an introvert who absolutely loves being with extroverts.

unknown 4:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

I love I love a friend who's an extrovert and who draws me out and who asks great questions and who talks a lot. Like I love being in the posture of listening. And so, yeah, I I actually really love some of my favorite friends have been extroverts whose personalities are really different from mine, in some cases whose interests are really different from mine. But I really love being with people who are really different from me, and especially people who are funny, because I wish, Paige, I wish I had the gift of like delivering a line that's hilarious. And I just don't. But you but you love being with the thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

I'm sure you bring some zingers every now and then, but you bring such rich, like just deep thoughts that I can't bring.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

I'm like, oh, I never thought of that, Tina. Well, I think, you know, as we dive in to really thinking about friendship, we have to realize that in reality friendship is really tough. I think a lot of us struggle with it. I know I have in adulthood, and the challenges, do you think they change as we get older, or are they just the same challenges over and over again?

SPEAKER_01 5:44

You know, I think they're the same challenges over and over again. I I do think, I think when we're teenagers, and and we'll address this later in in these episodes, but when we're teenagers, we think it everything's big and our world is smaller, and I think we we feel like when when we're adults it's gonna be better. Like, oh, when I'm an adult, I'll be able to do these things and do this, and from you know, but really our same insecure, the things that drive us in relationship or the things that make us necess maybe unhealthy in a relationship continue to go on. Because some things might happen in high school that make us operate a certain way or make assumption assumptions about people in general that take us through life. For instance, when I was in high school, I I went to a new high school right before my junior year, and I wasn't, you know, nothing against me. It just was a new girl. Senior girls didn't like me, they were kind of mean to me. So I just made this assumption well, girls getting together with girls and big groups of girls are not safe, they're not nice. I'm not gonna do, I'm not gonna be, I'm not gonna have a lot of girlfriends. And then God just kind of laughed at me and put me in women's ministry, you know, like but that uh truly, I was like, I I could not be I I when I first came to life by women, I was like, I'm swimming in women, like this is a lot of women. But he showed me that relationships can be rich and taught me new things about women, and but yes, the same insecurities that we want to be liked, we enter the scene, and you know, we're gonna talk about so many different elements of friendship in this uh in these episodes, but I think this need to be seen and known and loved for who we are is huge, and we carry that vulnerability everywhere we go, like hi, please like me, and hi, please see me, and and that's we carry that across our lives. Yeah, you know, I watched my mom in her long-term care facility trying to make new friends, you know, and have a because she she got there and all the ladies that knew each other had been there were at one table and she there was not a seat for her. So there's that that song.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

Yes, so it's who was like, There's not a seat for me. Where's my seat?

SPEAKER_01 7:40

Yeah, and she's eight in her eighties and she's looking for a seat. Yeah someone to play Rummy Cube with her, you know. It's and you so that we enter real new relationships with great courage and fear because we don't want to be rejected. And we bring this is here I am, I want to be accepted. So so yes, uh, you know, so I think what we're talking about so much here that's so important is how do we f lay those fears down and trust God and connect with Jesus to be the kind of friend He is. Yeah. And that's how it works, and that's how we can walk into a situation with with courage. But let's let's do talk about loneliness.

SPEAKER_02 8:18

I think we should, because at this point we it is an epidemic in our culture, loneliness. And it has really significant health impacts. It does. I was reading um in 2022, the Surgeon General of the United States did a study on loneliness because medical professionals were realizing that there were significant physical, physiological impacts to loneliness. And when they did a study, they reported that in 2021, almost half, 49% of Americans reported having three or fewer close friends, but only a quarter reported the same in 1990. So 27% said they had fewer than three close friends in tw in 1990, but by 2021 that number had grown twice to 49 percent. And then that same study found that when people were asked how close they felt to others emotionally, so now emotional closeness, only 39 percent of adults said they felt very connected to others. Recent surveys have found that approximately half of U.S. adults reported experiencing loneliness with some of the highest rates among young adults. What's going on there?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Well and how ironic is that is that our technology has made connecting so easy.

SPEAKER_02 9:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

You know, I mean, so at our fingertips. That's FaceTime or you know, texting or but but it is a different com kind of communication uh than this, this, and and we'll talk about that more in in our episodes, but that you cannot replace this being in each other's space, sensing, you know, I I counsel and I'll have people that I I counsel with on Zoom, and we've only ever counseled on Zoom, and it's there's a different energy, but when you're in the room with someone who's hurting and grieving, and you can hold their hand or you can just be in that space with them, there's something about sharing space, and we're doing that less and less and less.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

It's the pandemic.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

I think two things pandemic is one and social media is the other, that we have a thousand this uh relationships this deep, and very few that are very deep that we need because you can't go to that like a I talked about those basic needs we have as human beings to be seen, known, and loved for who we are, but we've lost more than I think we realize we've lost.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

For me, it's like I know when I look at the landscape of social media, a number of people on the on that I'm connected with on social media, they are real relationships. Yeah. But they're real relationships from my high school youth group and all the people that were in my church then, and all the people that I knew in the different seasons of my life, and now the multiplication of those connections from all different places and all different stages, collected with all the things, the relationships that I'm managing now, there are so many. They're real, but I can't be fully present in all of them. So you mentioned this study. So this podcast is designed to go alongside a Bible study called Friends and Sisters. And the goal of the study is really ask ourselves, what does scripture say, actually say about being friends? How does scripture define friendship? What are the dynamics of friendship that we see in scripture? Yeah. What kind of a friend was Jesus? How did Paul relate to his friends? We're gonna be looking at so many how how do friends resolve conflict? You know, we're gonna be looking at all the different dimensions of friendship.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

It's all there. Everything we need, like to learn how to be how to be a good friend, to serve in friendship, to be others focused, to be present, to be vulnerable. All those things are in here. Yeah. And even the courage to go and make new friends. That's right. And there's encouragement there when you know that when we're centered in Christ and and and our cup is full in him and we know who we are, we know our identity, we can go love freely without needing very much. We need to have give and take in friendship, but to not need life from another person. We can just go and freely give and freely receive. I love that. When we when we are with Jesus.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

So I feel like really what we're doing, we want to invite women who may feel like they don't have the friends they're looking for right now into this conversation with us. And then we also want to invite the women who may have a lot of friends but aren't as attentive to seeing friends around them. Yeah. Um, really, this conversation is for all of them. So every single episode, we're going to be opening scripture, reading it together. So I want to do that now. Let's do it. We're gonna actually go to a passage in 1 John 4. You can turn there with me. Okay. And this is 1 John 4, verse 7. And I love reading from uh this particular letter. It was written by one of Jesus' disciples named John, who was one of his closest friends, um, the beloved disciple, really close to Jesus. And so he was especially near to the Lord. All right. In fact, he was the one standing at the foot of the cross when Jesus looked down and said, Woman, your mother. Yes, he charged John with the care of his mother Mary. They were that close. All right, so we're gonna start in verse 7. Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way. God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. So twice in verse 7 and 11 we see that term dear friends. So in English we get the adjective dear to describe what kind of friends, like an especially close friend. But in Greek, this is just one word, and it's the word agape, agapeas, and it sounds a lot like agape. Okay. And agape because it's the exact same root word, and it just means beloved. Another translation of dear friends would be beloved, and it tells you just how deep this kind of friendship is in Christ. Um, and this is not the word that would have been used for friendship in typical Roman, Greco-Roman culture and the Greek and Roman culture. Then another word for friendship, and this word shows up in scripture too, philosop. That's also the word for friend. And we'll find that in other passages, but here, this is a particularly distinctive Christian kind of a friendship that's based in agape love, which is self-sacrificial, self-giving, the kind of love that we see Jesus loving us with when he gave his life on the cross. So it's a really a deep, different kind of love that would have been radical and unknown in the ancient world. That is the kind of loving friendship we're called into as Christians. So there's really something that is supernatural about Christian friendship. Christian friendship is supernatural, it's not natural. It is, it transcends our personalities, it transcends our personal preferences. Yeah. It is something altogether different and something that is going to be transformative for us as we get into understanding it better. We hope that you guys are going to join us for all five episodes of this podcast. Paige and I are going to be back. We are. We're back every time. And we're going to be inviting some of our friends to join us to talk about all the dimensions of Christian friendship. And we hope that you guys will be uh with us on this journey into understanding how to be better, friends and sisters. In the show notes, you can find a link to the Bible study book, Friends and Sisters. We'd love for you to grab a copy.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Follow along with us in it.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Yeah, study along with us, dive into scripture with us. We know that every single time we open God's Word, we're going to find life in these pages.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Thank you for listening to the Friends and Sisters Podcast. Executive Producers Tina Bosch and Angie Elkins. Producer, Chelsea Walk. Engineer Donnie Gordon, edited by Caleb Hoopingarner, art by Chelsea Walk and Skyla Sheffelbeen. Photography, Emily Bergeron. Content editor, Laura Magnus. For a deeper dive, check out the Friends and Sisters Bible study book that accompanies this podcast, linked in the show notes. Your hosts are Tina Bosch and Paige Keaton, recorded at the Lifeway Podcast Studio in Brentwood, Tennessee.