Mirror, Mirror

My grandchildren are learning how to throw amazing tantrums. During our traditional Sunday lunch, Scott instructed his daughter to sit up in her chair. Norah considered this cruel and unusual punishment and let us all know by sliding out of her chair onto the floor and melting down in a toddler tantrum. I noticed her cousin giving her the side eye with a little smile thrown in for extra charm.

“Christian, what do you think of that?” I ask, nodding toward Norah.

“Norah is having a fit Meme. She needs a snack or a nap.” he replies.

“Yeah, but what do you think about it? Where do you think she learned her moves?”

“I dunno,” he shrugs and shows all the indications of a male child quickly losing interest in a subject his grandmother finds fascinating.

“Dude, those are all your moves! She is TOTALLY imitating you!”

A troubling look of possible self-realization passes over his cherubic face and then he makes his counter move. “No way Meme! I do not do that!”

“Oh, yes you do my friend. This is what it looks like when you have trouble leaving Meme and Pop’s house, or when Mom gives you consequences. If you don’t like this way of handling problems, we could talk about new ways to handle big feelings, just let me know.”

He nods. So often we see (and judge) in others behaviors that we do not recognize in ourselves. Although Christian has yet to take me up on a conversation about coping with big feelings, I did notice this past Sunday that when I gave him his “transition” time warning for heading home, he and I made eye contact as he was lifting up his little foot for a big stomp. He pauses and quietly lowers his foot. He pauses; he nods. He leaves without a whimper at the appointed time. Sometimes it helps to look into a mirror of sorts

Do you like what you see in your mirror? Are there any behaviors, beliefs, or attitudes that you find particularly annoying in others? Can you find some common ground? If so, we might also find more empathy for others and maybe a gentle impetus to change a few things in ourselves.

A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.

Ken Keyes Jr.

A Friendship with Jesus…

In the gospel of John, Jesus invites us into his circle of friendship. In this circle of love we can expect the following: love, honesty, loyalty, mutuality, intimacy, companionship and more. We’ll get to the more in a minute, but first, consider this:

A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.

You are my friends, if you do what I command you.

I shall not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know his master’s business; I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father.

You did not choose me, no, I chose you.

John 15:13-16

After the initial rush of gratitude for all that friendship offers, we need to pause and count the cost. Jesus was offering friendship with conditions. In human friendships following commands should NEVER be part of the equation! But with Jesus, he is saying that friends of his have common values, listen to his voice, and follow him. When we accept friendship with Jesus we are also surrendering to know everything Jesus learned from God. We are signing up for the kinds of friendship God endorses.

Friendship involves suffering. It requires humility. It invokes the opportunity for patience.

Over twenty years ago when I signed up to participate in Northstar Community I had one of those rare moments when I sensed God explicitly giving me directions and offering me the opportunity to be his friend and follow him. It was a warm summer night in 1998, the sun had set, and a group of us had just left a meeting with our beloved Pastor James Pardue. We paused under the portico that stands between the church and the parking lot. It occurred to us that permission might indeed be granted for us to launch this new pilot project. It came to me in a flash of insight that this might “work” and perhaps it would last longer than 8 weeks. I did not want to be gone from my routine, the weekly spiritual food found in Jim’s carefully crafted sermons, my tenth grade Sunday School class that I loved teaching with my friends Rob and Jean, being on the same schedule and in the same building as my kids. But deep down in my heart, I knew something else. I knew that if we started this new thing, I had to be willing to stay for the long haul. Creating space for suffering folks would mean, for me at least, that if they gathered, I could not abandon the effort. I think I said to Pete, “You know, if we join this effort, and if it works, we have to be committed. This is not the kind of thing you enter with half a heart.” I had my own baggage and a certain lethargy in my feet about taking on this kind of project. But my heart had other ideas about spiritual friendship knowing that God invites us to lay down our life for not only our friends (the families of this church we had been in for decades) but HIS friends. I believe that once we experience being chosen by God for friendship, it becomes necessary to be the kind of person who chooses others - whether or not it suits our preferences.

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.