Stories in this episode: Sarah longs for a new perspective after loss and finds it with a feisty group of octogenarians in LA; A kilt-wearing stranger shows up to Brian's weekly game night and volunteers to take a road trip with him; Emily promises 99-year-old Mac she'll get him to 100 and finds the best friend she was promised by God in the process. SHOW NOTES: To see pictures and videos from our storytellers this week, go here. TRANSCRIPT: KaRyn Lay: Welcome to "This Is the Gospel," an LDS Living podcast where we feature real stories from real people who are practicing and living their faith every day. I'm your host, KaRyn Lay, and I'm here with my friend and fellow producer Sarah Blake. Sarah: Hi, everybody. KaRyn Lay: Sarah, why are we here together today? Sarah: Because today's episode is about unexpected friendships. And we're talking about friendship and our friendship is something to celebrate. KaRyn Lay: It's totally something to celebrate! Sarah and I first met, actually, I don't remember the moment that we first met, do you? Sarah: No, me neither. KaRyn Lay: I just feel like I've always known you. But I do know that we first met in a singles ward in Salt Lake City in our 20s when we were just doing the things that single people who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do in their 20s. So like, I'd see you at FHE and occasionally like at a "Munch and Mingle," if we felt like we had the energy to go to that and try to flirt with a boy, right? I feel like you and I just always had so much in common. So it was really easy for us to be friends. Sarah: Yeah, really natural. We're readers, we're writers, we're prolific Goodwill shoppers. KaRyn Lay: I was always jealous of your red boots. Sarah: Those were my best find ever. KaRyn Lay: Yeah, that was a good find. So we've been thinking about friendships and how it's really easy to be friends with somebody who has a lot of things in common with you. And it's much harder to be friends with the people who seem different. Sarah: Or maybe it's, maybe it's that it's harder to start those friendships, right? It can be unexpectedly easy, but you weren't looking for it and you didn't know how to start it. KaRyn Lay: And I think Sarah, the reason that you're here, beyond just us celebrating our friendship, is that you have a story about a really unexpected friendship that you want to share with us, right? Sarah: Yeah, when we picked this topic, this story of my own immediately came to mind. Do you want me to tell it? KaRyn Lay: Of course I want you to tell it. I love a good story. Sarah: Okay. So when my husband Casey and I were first married, we lived in Los Angeles. And it was a very fun time. We were renovating this duplex we had bought, we lived pretty close to the beach, sometimes we saw movie stars. It was pretty idyllic in a lot of ways. But we had this little dark rain cloud in our life, which was infertility. We really wanted to start our family but we just didn't get pregnant, didn't get pregnant, then I had a miscarriage. And then we couldn't get pregnant and had another miscarriage. And it was a hard time for me and I wasn't talking to very many people about it. I just couldn't even bring myself to say the words of what I was struggling with. And I remember even a couple days after my second miscarriage, I went to babysit for my friend's kids, so she and her husband could go to the temple. And I really wanted to do that for my friend, I also thought it'd be good for me to get out of the house instead of laying around crying. So I went and her kids wanted to watch the Disney movie, "Tarzan." And that opening scene where the gorilla mom loses her baby, I mean, I just sat there crying and crying in the dark, trying to wipe away tears so her kids—my friend's kids—wouldn't see how sad I was. But I still didn't tell her even, like I didn't tell my friends at night when she got home what I was dealing with. I just couldn't talk about it. But I needed someone who understood. And I think heavenly father knew what I needed. So in our ward, there was this row of old ladies, what do you call a group of old ladies? A gaggle? A pew? They all took the back row in the chapel and everybody knew that was their place. And these women were in their 80s and 90s. They had all moved to LA in the 40s and 50s for their husbands to work for Howard Hughes Aircraft stuff. And then they'd all had a ton of kids and their kids are all grown and their husbands were all dead. And now they had each other in this awesome sisterhood that sat together. They were spunky, feisty, interesting women. And one day I was sitting next to one of them in Relief Society and she mentioned that they had formed a chapter of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. And I really identify with my own, like Utah pioneer ancestry. And so I said, that's super cool. And they invited me to come to a meeting. So I went to a meeting and I didn't know what to expect, but it was just all the ladies from the back row of the chapel. I don't know if they'd ever invited anybody young before or if anybody else had ever been interested, but they were really excited to have somebody new there. And somebody gave a presentation about a pioneer ancestor, and we all stood with our hand on our hearts and recited something and we sang a song and scheduled the next meeting. But then it got really fun when they broke out the deserts and just sat around talking. And I realized that as a young woman growing up, you don't very often get to see older women in their natural habitat, you know, just like letting loose and talking with their friends. And I know my mom had good friends and those friendships were important to her, but I never saw them quite like this, and my grandmother's, too. But what was amazing to me was these women sat and talked about their lives, and they were just reminiscing, but they were telling the stories of the worst things that had ever happened to them. And then they were laughing their heads off because like life had moved on and they saw it with this perspective that I think you can only get in your 80s. Like, "Remember the time when all our husbands got laid off at the same time and one of the husbands had to lay off half of them?" Or the time the kid jumped off the roof and broke his arms. Or, one of them had a disabled son and she spent literally decades fighting with doctors to keep him out of institutions. And another woman had this daughter who just did everything wrong that she could, like doing drugs and running away to follow a rock band and saying the most outrageous and rude things. And they would tell a story and then they would just like laugh until they cried, wiping the tears from their eyes and slapping their knees and stuff. And it was amazing to me. And I didn't even realize quite how it was causing a shift in me. But I remember driving home from that meeting. And I don't think there's very many moments in life where you feel changed by just a few hours, but this was one of those for me, because I realized that I had been just, I felt surrounded by these walls of my doubt and my self-pity, my tragic sense of how hard my life was right now. And it was like all those walls had been pushed way back by the perspective of older women. Seeing it in their own lives really, truly, "Time heals all wounds," and "This too shall pass," and life will go on. I suddenly had a vision that there's a future me out there in her 80s, maybe she's surrounded by loving posterity or maybe she's not. But either way, she's okay. And like, it's going to be okay. This is just a moment, and life is still full of joy. And none of my younger friends could have taught me that. Anybody saying you know, "You're probably going to get pregnant soon, it's going to be fine." It wouldn't have done it for me, it wouldn't have been what I needed in the same way it was just rubbing shoulders with these women whose own life experience could show me truly it is going to be okay. KaRyn Lay: First of all, I adore the visual of you in your 30s, sitting in this room full of octogenarians, slapping your knees and laughing. Sarah: I wish you could have met them. They were so great. KaRyn Lay: It sounds so great. And I love that that friendship was exactly what you needed at that exact moment. And the other friendships with people that you would have immediately been drawn to, maybe that had something more in common with you like age or stage of life, wasn't actually what you needed. Sarah: I think that is probably true for a lot of hardship. Like when you're going through something, your usual friends might not be the ones you need the most. KaRyn Lay: So how do you find these kinds of friendships? Like, what's the secret for opening yourself up to a kind of friendship that you wouldn't maybe naturally look out for? Sarah: Well, I think a lot of it is just a gift of God sometimes, right? And being open to that. But I think in the stories in this episode, there's an element of risk. And on the other side of a little risk is the reward of a new friendship. KaRyn Lay: So true, so true. And like you said, today we've got two more stories from people who took that risk, who opened themselves up and found friendship that absolutely surprised them in the best ways. Our first story comes from Brian, who was perfectly content and happy with the friends that he had when a kilt-wearing stranger offered to accompany him on a road trip. Here's Brian. Brian: So I guess it's kind of ironic that in a room that included dwarves and elves and ogres, that it would be the bald human that would have such a profound effect on my life. Growing up, I was always a real introvert, I only had a couple of really close friends. And it stayed that way until I got home from my mission and started going to a young single adult ward. I started to beco
