Imagining Better Friendships
Within my own imagination I lack the capacity to be a good friend. The bible is full of friendship stories; I learn as I read this sacred text that the origins of friendship are from God. I don’t need an imagination, God showed us the way; what I need is courage. David is not necessarily the guru of relationships seeing as how he cheated on his wife, got his friend Uriah the Hittite killed to hide his infidelity and generally made a muck of it as a parent. But what we learn when we study the life of David is that no one is “one thing”. This is a vital thing to know if we strive to be a good friend.
One Sunday after service, someone texted me and said this, “Hey, in my small zoom group this morning there were folks in there that are too politically conservative for me and I find this too upsetting to keep zooming.” I replied by affirming everyone’s right to choose and expressed my honest regret that this is so hard for him. I couldn’t help but think that perhaps he, like me, suffers from a lack of imagination. Brene Brown talks about this concept of having a “shared enemy” - i.e., agreeing with each other on sensitive topics, as faux intimacy. My own imagination is so limited, that at first, like my friend, I can only envision what it is like to feel a kinship with others who think like me. God sees friendship differently. My imagination and my friendship practice expands when I consider David. For all his faults, David had an imagination for what it means to be a good friend - at least to Jonathan (not so much to Uriah the Hittite). Jonathan, son of Saul, became fast friends with David in spite of Saul’s political jealousy over David’s popularity and eventual replacement of him as king. They were loyal, took enormous risks for one another and eventually their families bound together for all time through the generations who followed them. When Jonathan died, David cried these words:
O Jonathan, in your death I am stricken, I am desolate for you, Jonathan my brother. Very dear to me you were, your love to me more wonderful than the love of a woman.
2 Samuel 1:26
Jonathan and David were political enemies and loved each other with all their hearts. I want to be that kind of friend. Now, another option remains to all of us even if we stick with David as our model. When truths became inconvenient between David and Uriah, David arranged to have Uriah killed. Snuffed out. (Picture David having to say to Uriah, “Hey dude, while you were out fighting my battles for me I got your wife knocked up.”)
So we have these choices within these biblical examples. We can distance, detach, and eliminate all the people who inconveniently make us think, doubt, wonder and even judge them or ourselves. This will provide momentarily relief. No more awkward conversations. We can find friends we bond with and agree with and all will feel better...for a while. Or, we can decide that we want to live into the kind of friendship God had in mind. You remember it, right? The kind that when we do not quite fit up to his ideals for us, he still loves us like crazy. God knows that we can be more than one thing, and he hangs in with us for all of the mess that we are and the good that we are too.
