Welcome to the love honor and vacuum podcast. I'm Sheila Ray Gregoire from the to love honor and vacuum blog where we like to talk about how to make marriage into a passionate adventure and not just a giant to-do list.

And this month in March on the blog, we haven't been talking about marriage

so much as something that marriage really needs, which is a healthy community. I don't think

we're meant to live alone. We need to be in larger groups of

people that can encourage us and where we can find friends and where we can talk and

etc etc and so we've been talking a lot of the block about how to find healthy churches.

And this week on Monday I wrote a post, well actually you all wrote the post.

I asked on Facebook about ideas of how to break in and find friends when you're in a new church and then I compiled all of those ideas, put it up in a great post on Monday.

I really encourage you to read that. I'm going to put it in the description to this podcast so please go go

go read that because it's so important on how to find friends but as we're

talking about this I wanted to highlight a comment that came in about that.

So I'm just going to read it to you and then Rebecca, my daughter Rebecca and I are going to talk about it a bit.

So Jessica wrote, I appreciated what you said above about how

sometimes it's hard to break in because the community is actually a healthy one. Because we're

in a Sunday school class at our church that has a

core group that's been together since fall of 2005 when we were all engaged or

newly married. Many couples have come and gone in that time but there there's about seven or eight couples, including us, that have been in that class for all or most of that time.

And while we really aren't like a tight group that spends all of our time together,

we have shared a lot of history together. And I can see how someone could

come into our class and think, these people have known each other their whole lives. Is there really

any room for me here? So there's a delicate push and pull. A thriving church will have people who have close

friendships and longstanding relationships and lots of shared history and this is good and you

...