Remember when making new friends was simple? You met someone in your class at school and you both had a Lisa Frank folder and you were instant BFFs, spending all of your time together at recess, going over to each other’s houses for play dates and sleepovers.

As you get older you get more choosy with your friends. You start to talk about deeper things with them like your future, your crush, issues at home or with other friends. People who you thought would be in your life forever drift away, forging their own paths in life.

I have had the privilege throughout the last 29 years to come across some incredible human beings. People who have laughed with me, supported me, encouraged me, and loved me. Different chapters of my life have provided an array of characters into my life. Some of them have stayed, and sometimes, we drift our separate ways, living separate lives, still having love for one another, but settling more and more into our new chapters.

I have found that the older I become the more choosy I become with my time. There are people that I see weekly, others fewer than that, and even others fewer still.

This makes investing in new relationships tricky. I love meeting new people, but I struggle to get past the well-meaning and friendly, but idle small talk. I want to get to the heart of who they are, what makes them tick, what their passions are, but sometimes that’s too much for people, and I don’t want to make them uncomfortable. So, I fall back to my people; the ones I see all the time and who will go deep with me.

But, if I look at how Jesus went into relationship with other people, he blew straight past any idle talk, or social norms. He cut straight to the heart. Asked the hard questions. Take the story of the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.

Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? ¹² Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

“I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

I mean come on. This guy went straight in. No pleasantries. Immediately disregarding social norms that Jews shouldn’t talk with Samaritans and that men should not talk to a woman in public.

I believe that Jesus wants this out of our relationships, too. He desires to see a community truly sharing life with one another and loving on each other in real, authentic ways.

Friends, how can we push through the social norms of our society, to the heart of people? People whom Jesus loves and beat death for. I know I’ll be praying about this, and I’ll be praying that you do, too.