Katie

I don't remember when I first met Katie, but it was at bible study, and I don't remember if we ever officially said, "Hi, my name is Jennifer," "Hi, my name is Katie," or if we just eventually spoke to each other. I think it was in the fall of 2011 when I met her. I found out in January 2012 that we were both going to Slovakia for the first time. I didn't think much of it, and just thought we were really different people. I thought that I was much quieter than her and she was much louder than me, and that everybody liked her so she would steal the spotlight and nobody would pay any attention to me or be my friend because they would all like Katie better.

Never ever count somebody out and think you won't be friends with them.

Fast forward. On our way to Slovakia we stayed in London for the night. When we got to the hotel and wrote down our passport numbers at the front desk, the guy said he just put us in rooms by the order of what we wrote down, and Katie and I were assigned a room together. Truthfully I was sad because there were other girls I wanted to be in a room with, and I thought she'd be loud and that I wouldn't be able to sleep. We went to sleep quickly that night. We had to be up around 4:30 AM to get going to get our plane. Around 3 AM I awoke to Katie saying something.

"What," I asked.
"What? Did I say something?"
"Yeah but I don't know what," I said.
She laughed and said, "Oh! I talk in my sleep sometimes."

For some reason though, we started talking. And then we talked for an hour and a half. I thought, alright I like this girl. She's cool. We were in different cities in Slovakia, so I didn't see her much during our time there.

August 2012, we were put together to lead 9th and 10th grade girls at church together, along with another lady. Here we go again, another false assumption from my brain: I thought that all the girls would like her so much more than me, that she would talk the whole time and not let me talk, that she would not take things seriously. I just thought... "we are not going to lead well together." This was absolutely false. Of course some girls liked her better than me because they thought she was so funny and cool. But other girls thought the same of me. While she could relate to the cheerleaders, the outgoing, the funny, and the "cool" girls, I could relate to the quieter ones, the aspiring photographers, the artsy girls, and the bookworms.

While we grew in our friendship, I still struggled with jealousy towards her - she had the boyfriend she was so excited about, she got the paid internship at church that I had hoped for, and a lot of my friends were good friends with her. She could make everybody in the room laugh. In April of 2013, a night came when she needed a ride home from bible study, and I drove her home. We started talking, and I opened up to her about something that was a burden to me, that was heavy on my heart and that I hadn't shared with hardly anybody else. In turn, she did too, and we sat in her driveway talking for a long time.

We started going to lunch sometimes and talked more often and rode together in the car more often, and I lost all sense of jealousy towards her. When she went to Slovakia again, I missed her SO MUCH! When she got home and I was at the church to meet everybody there, I almost cried. After a week or two of her being back home I asked if she wanted to meet with me every week to talk about the bible. She said yes, so I started going to her house every week in August, and we read the bible and talked about it, and caught up from what was going on in our lives. We began to see that we are a LOT alike! We like the same music, we don't care about dressing up all fancy, we think the same, we have the same feelings and emotions and reactions to things, we underline the same things in books and scripture a lot of times, and more. What started out as a girl I wasn't sure I'd even be friends with became my best friend.