A Prayer for Us as We Navigate Life…

Lord, may I be at peace.

Father, may my heart remain open.

Holy Spirit, guide me as I seek to know myself, experience healing, and draw near to you.

Grant that I might be a source of healing for others.

Even as I am grateful to those who support my healing.

Amen.

Unlikely Love

God has given us so many incredible examples of unlikely love. Take for example Ruth and Naomi. Ruth came from a different religious background than Naomi, her mother-in-law. After their shared affection dies (Ruth’s husband, Naomi’s son) Naomi graciously offers Ruth the gift of freedom. She invites her to return home to her family of origin. This would enable Ruth to find another husband, maybe even one who lived near her family.

Naomi faces an uncertain future but Ruth refuses to bail on her. Ruth says this -

“Do not press me to leave you and to turn back from your company, for wherever you go, I will go, wherever you live, I will live. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.

Ruth 1:16

But this is highly speculative - Ruth is a “foreigner” in a land that does not like immigrants - especially as marriage material. Going home for Naomi, now without sons, in no means guarantees a warm reception and provision for care. In the end all is well.

But Ruth does not know that when she chooses to be a good friend to Naomi.

Good friends make decisions that are often NOT in their best interest in deference to the higher call of love. I for one have been blessed with friends who have shown me that kind of love; I try to be that kind of friend back. But there is no guarantee that I can and will be a good friend. They love me anyway.

Good friends take the right kind of risks - they risk personal comfort in favor of brotherly love. They risk awkward moments of disagreement in favor of loss of connection. They risk conflict in favor of abandonment.

These are not easy times and yet we must remember this: it has never been easy to be a good friend. I wonder if we might pray for all of us to be better friends now that we have so many stark reminders of the potential for loss as a result of disease and intolerance.

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.

Being a Good Friend

Desperation is unsustainable.

Cheryl Strayed

I realize that for many of us we experience different kinds of desperation. Some of my friends are desperate to see their grandchildren, others are desperate for their sick loved ones to survive covid. I have friends who have fared well in this economy and others have been without work for nine months. Some of my friends feel desperate about the election results; others are desperate for the inauguration of the newly elected president. None of this is sustainable.

At some point in time, all of us are going to run out of adrenaline and we’re going to have to ask the question - what next? Surprise, surprise, I have a suggestion.

Be a good friend. Friendship is all well and good when there is no discord or conflict, easy peasy lemon squeezy. Friendship is all fun and games when both parties share the same definition and experience of desperation. But what happens when the two roads diverge and there is some distance? This is the space where we find out whether we have (or are) a friendly connection or a good friend. A good friend is not just a person that you like and they like you back. A GOOD friend is one who, according to the proverbs, sticks close as a brother. I am lucky enough to understand this proverb. I have a brother who comes when I call and who calls when he needs me to go - and we go. Full stop. End of sentence.

Stress does funny things to people and I am hearing a ton of chatter about how many friendships are being re-evaluated after a prolonged period of cultural desperation. I’m not on board with the idea that friendship needs to be based on perfect alignment of opinions. A good friend is able to endure the pain of distance and just hold on until the necessary shift happens - however that looks. A good friend does not require the other to make them feel better. Good friends are not there to shore up our egos. A good friend practices self-reflection more than other-analysis. A good friend works on the practices required to do hard things - because being a good friend is hard. Grace. Mercy. Forgiveness. A good friend sticks close like a brother when it would be easier to disconnect. A good friend fights for the friendship in ways that are often humbling. A good friend gently lets go when they discover that they had a friendly connection rather than a friendship because they love their friend more than they love the gift of friendship they received. I want to be the kind of person who can tolerate the discomfort of difference. How about you? What’s going to be left of us when our adrenalin-fueled desperation runs out? What happens when we move beyond the beliefs, ideas, and ideologies that we are so enamored with right now? Who will be left to bring us a chicken casserole when we need it? Who will we bring a chicken casserole to?

Friends come and friends go, but a true friend sticks by you like family.

Proverbs 18:24 The Message

Practicing Unconditional Love

You must love in order to be loved. You must be inclusive in order to feel yourself among the include. You must give in order to receive.

Cheryl Strayed

I am so surprised by the universal feeling of being odd, uncool, set apart. I scroll through Facebook and see all these perfect families having their amazing adventures and I think - “Wow, they must be a really put together family.” Maybe there are some of those out there.

When I get to know families, even the ones with the perfect family photos and the amazing destination adventures, I have not yet met a perfectly put together family. Hope springs eternal I guess, but I wonder, especially during this time of chaos and upheaval and crisis, if there might be another perspective to consider.

If Jesus and his community had the internet, there was a young man who surely would have been an instagram influencer. In Mark 10, this influencer shows up and asks Jesus, quite dramatically on fallen knee, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus takes some offense to being called “good” by this young man and reminds him of the ten commandments. Which, according to this young ruler, he has kept since he was a boy. Maybe I’m reading something into the text that isn’t here but I hesitantly observe that Jesus has easily welcomed women and children, the demon possessed, and a woman my mother would refer to as a hussy. But this young man? What happens to him? This guy with his sense of righteousness and wealth? What does Jesus do with him.

He loves him. Jesus also suggests he sell all his possessions and give them to the poor! Head bent in sadness, the young man walks away. In fairness, we do not know what the young ruler chose to do. Maybe he eventually did just as Jesus asked. We do not know.

But what we do know is that Jesus was an inclusive kind of guy. He loved the rich and poor, the slaves and free, the Greeks and Jews, the naughty and the nice.

What if we decided to follow that example and love one another all willy nilly? We could stop fretting over who agreed with us or who loved us back and we could just love people. We could love them whether or not they pose on Facebook or shun Facebook. We could love our friends and our enemies. There might need to be some follow up conversations as to how that will look, but wow - I imagine they would be far more interesting then some of the conversations we are engaging in as of late!