I think one of the biggest challenges of adulthood is making friends. Sure, it’s easy to have lots of acquaintances, or “friends” on social media, but it’s more challenging to build deep, life-giving relationships. My husband and I call them “2 a.m. friends”—people who would pick up the phone if you called them in the middle of the night.

I had a handful of those friends when we lived in the US Mostly, they were other young moms from our church. We connected over stories of juggling full-time jobs, volunteering with the youth ministry, and raising toddlers. It was so hard to say goodbye to them when we moved, but I assumed we’d find ways to keep in touch and that I’d easily form new friendships on the field.

When we first moved, I was so caught up in the adventure of starting a new life overseas, I didn’t feel the lack of close friends right away. We were meeting new, interesting people all the time, and our friends and relatives back home were just a phone call away!

But over time, those phone calls started to feel complicated. I couldn’t just share a quick update from my week without providing lots of context about people, places, and cultural norms. So many of the things I was struggling with—language gaffes, cultural faux pas, helping my kids adapt—were things they just couldn’t relate to. In addition, the huge time difference made it difficult to schedule times to connect.

Of course, our teammates became our good friends. And not just our friends, but also our accountability partners, babysitters, coworkers, and church—a tall order for a group of six or eight adults with jobs, families, and responsibilities of their own! While our teammates were a critical part of our support network, over time we learned that it wasn’t reasonable to expect them to provide for all our relational needs.

We’ve also made some wonderful local friends over the years. Our closest local friends—initially our language teachers and house helpers—are the ones who helped us when we were linguistic and cultural “babies.” They were our guides as we learned to function in our new home culture, teaching us how to take public transportation, translating our kids’ homework assignments, and explaining the new phrases we heard on the street. There’s something incredibly vulnerable about entering a culture with the understanding of a child, and that vulnerability is great soil for friendship to grow!

But while our local friends have been a huge blessing, there are aspects of our lives that we can’t share with them. We live in a Muslim country that does not grant visas to missionaries. My husband’s work provides us with a way to live here legally and an identity that makes sense to our local friends, but I can’t tell them about the challenges I face as a team leader or my struggle to balance family and ministry.

Our sending organization has always encouraged us to collaborate with other “God’s team” members in our region, but we were cautious about making friends with other expats at the beginning. We were warned about how easy it can be to fill up your calendar with birthday parties and holiday gatherings with other foreigners, leaving little time for connecting with locals. So, at the beginning, we kept our friend circle small, focusing mostly on our relationships with our team and locals.

Then, four years into our life overseas, a family on our team who had been our closest friends had to move back to their passport country. Their kids were around the same age as ours, and we were used to showing up at their house on a random evening to share leftovers, play games, and let our kids run wild. We were devastated when they left. Even though we had other teammates who were kind, lovely people, we felt the loss of close friends who were walking through the same phase of life as us.

Just a month later, at a leadership training, the speakers talked about the importance of having relationships characterized by openness, vulnerability, and authenticity. If we didn’t have those relationships, they said, we should look at our existing circle of relationships, even those who weren’t in close proximity, and take intentional steps to pursue them. Get creative, they said, and pray!

We took their advice and started to look for ways to expand our circle, and we prayed for the Lord to send us the kind of deep friendships we longed for. And he provided for us in so many ways!

At a conference, my husband made a friend who lives in another North African country and shares his love of mountain biking. At another conference a year later, they spent their free day biking together, and we started having dates with him and his wife over Zoom. He also started connecting with Spanish speakers in the city. He was born in South America, and it gave him a chance to practice his first language and share his beloved yerba maté. We also decided to try out more clubs and activities for our kids, which helped us connect with other parents in our area.

I started having coffee dates with another mom in our city about once a month. We come from different sending organizations and have different philosophies about how to do ministry, but we have kids around the same ages, and we share a love of good pastries and long conversations. We talk about the benefits and challenges of local schools versus homeschooling, how to plan meals with local produce and limited convenience foods, and how to handle our kindergarten sons’ boundless energy.

I can’t tell you how life-giving these conversations are for me. Not only is my friend full of good ideas, but just knowing someone else is wrestling with the same small, daily challenges somehow makes them feel lighter. I’m able to laugh about the things that had me in tears the day before.

As workers, it’s easy to take on a do-it-yourself approach to life on the field. But just like it takes a proverbial village to raise kids, it takes a community to ensure that we are healthy and thriving on the field, and it takes time, effort, and creativity to build that community. But it’s time and effort well spent. Good friends are God’s grace and mercy to us on the field, and we should be open to both ask him for them and to receive the gift.