Spiritual Friendship
If ever there has been a time to be grateful for friendships, it’s been in the last five months.
I’ve appreciated all the humorous memes and posts about how 2020 has been one giant dumpster fire of a year, but in all seriousness, these few months have placed our souls, emotions, and closest relationships into a giant pressure cooker.
Still, with so much pressing in and trying to divide us and tear us apart from one another, I’ve found so much gratitude for the deep friendships in my life. Even as we’ve been separated and isolated during lockdowns and quarantines, we've found creative ways to spend time together and maintain connection, and that’s been so beautiful to me. These friends have been messengers of hope, celebrators in our joy as we expect our first child, fellow mourners and lamenters as we all adjust and struggle through so much change and loss. Oh, how we’ve needed them!
So today, I want to invite you to consider how spiritual friendships breathe life into our journeys with Jesus, and how to develop these friendships in your own life.
We need each other.
As Christians, we hold onto a foundational, orthodox belief in the Triune God — one God, three Persons represented as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We see in the Scriptures that the three Persons of the Trinity have a special, perfect, loving union with one another, and that together they created us into their image (see Genesis 1:26). To be made in God’s image, then, means we are relational creatures. Social scientists and psychologists have confirmed research that supports how our brain chemistry and physiology is impacted by our relationships with one another, as well as our mental and emotional states.
But I don’t think we need too much research to confirm what the last few months have taught us. We need each other.
In her book The Cultivated Life, Susan Phillips writes about asking hospice patients what they regretted as they prepared for death. “Letting friendships lapse was one of the top five regrets people mentioned at the ends of their lives. People regret the loss of friendship, yet our culture offers little instruction about maintaining friendships. Doing so is a spiritual discipline” (p. 166).
Why is this so dang hard?!
Too often, we can get stuck thinking that deep, meaningful community and relationships are supposed to just happen, especially in the church. It should be easy to develop lifelong, rich friendships among people of our own faith, right? If only that were true! Ruth Haley Barton writes in Life Together in Christ that community is one of the most overpromised and underdelivered promises of the modern Christian life. Does that resonate with you? My husband is the community life pastor at our church, and he’s quoted this often. We long for community and deep friendship so badly, but we struggle to know how to cultivate and participate in it. We forget that to have spiritual friends means we first have to become one.
I know this isn’t new information, and I’m sure we’ve all probably heard this a thousand times: if I want to have friends, I have to be a friend. And right now, we need a little help with this, don’t we?
As we’ve taken to spending more time online for human connection in the midst of a pandemic and worldwide topsy-turvy madness, we’ve gotten really good at judging others based upon their posts and shares, at whose voices they’re listening to and which sources they’re trusting. And it’s easy to make a long list of assumptions and misconceptions about someone, thinking, “Oh….they’re one of those people.” I know this because I’ve been caught in it, too, and I’m not proud of it. I want to live differently. I want to cultivate meaningful friendships with others, even if they see, interpret, and respond to things differently than I do. (And, dare I say, even if they vote differently than I do?) I want to resist the temptation to reduce a human being to their social media feeds, and instead choose to see their complexity and worth.
When I look at scripture, especially the words that Paul wrote to so many growing communities of faith in the early church, I see the same things we’re experiencing now. It’s hard to love. It’s hard to set differences aside and remember that we are part of one body. We belong to each other.
I feel as though the Lord God is continually reminding me that the gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t simply about being saved from sin and death, but being saved into the people of God. Our old selves have died, Paul tells us in Colossians 3, and with it our broken ways of interacting with others. Being controlled by our impulses, lying, talking badly about others, holding grudges, and practicing prejudice and divisiveness are to be taken off, like a filthy old piece of clothing, and put to death. Our new selves have been raised to life with Christ, and as resurrection people, we’ve been given a new set of clothes, and a new way of being in relationship with one another:
Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. And above all of these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. (Colossians 3:12-15, ESV)
How to be a spiritual friend
So how do we practice the spiritual discipline of friendship? Honestly, I’m learning all of this right along with all of you. I’d like to think I’m a good friend, but I know I fall short. All the dang time. But I love people. Deeply. And I love the church. And I know God loves His bride, and He’s always at work in the world, showing us how to love. Even when we are filled with the Spirit of Jesus, even when we are surrendered to Him, we still have a way to go in learning to love like He loves. And learning to love, I think, is a lifelong educational process.
So, here are two very practical steps we can all make towards becoming the kind of spiritual friends we long to have.
STAY CLOSE TO THE HEART OF JESUS
A couple of weeks ago, I sat in a beautiful yard with a wonderful group of ladies on a cool evening, discussing John 15:1-17. I’ve always loved this passage, this command from Jesus to make our home in Him as He has made His home in us. It’s a very spiritual-formationy kind of passage. 🙂 There is nothing more important to our spiritual health than staying connected to Jesus, the true vine. Without Him, we dry up and shrivel and wither. Not only that—we can’t actually grow the fruit of compassion, patience, kindness, humility, and forgiveness. But with Him, along with the Father’s careful and painful pruning, we’ll produce fruit in abundance that will just keep on growing.
To produce this kind of abiding fruit, Jesus says, means that we do what He says. And what He says in this passage, is to abide in His love and to extend that love to one another. As we abide in Him, we bear the fruit of obedience, which is to love as He loves, and on and on the cycle goes. Our love for others will continue to expand, and we’ll offer it out of freedom. I so want to love others with the kind of expansiveness that doesn’t come with the limitations of condition, but flows out of being transformed by the abiding love that Christ has for me.
“These things I command you, so that you will love one another,” Jesus says (John 15:17, ESV). Loving one another becomes increasingly difficult without staying close to the heart of Jesus.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that full life in Christ is so deeply connected to our relationships with one another.
BECOME A GREAT LISTENER
One of the best, most generous gifts of love that we can offer is that of listening to another person as they bare their soul. This means that being a spiritual friend requires that we intentionally listen to understand and to accompany another—rather than listening so that we can come up with a clever, insightful response.
Listening means asking questions that help our friend to discover the deepest truths about who they are and who God is.
It means sitting with them in the pain, rather than offering platitudes that mitigate our own discomfort.
It means leaving space for the breadth of emotions and questions and doubts that we all experience.
In The Listening Life, author and spiritual director Adam McHugh makes an insightful point:
“Therapists I know say that many of their clients meet with them simply because they are not being listened to in their most important relationships. Without diminishing the value of professional therapy, I would argue that the fact that we pay millions of dollars annually for people to listen to us indicates our poverty in this arena. Everyone is talking, but so few people are truly being heard.” (Adam McHugh, The Listening Life, pp. 11-12).
A PRACTICAL EXERCISE FROM SPIRITUAL COMPANIONING
Listening for the sake of being present to another person takes practice. One of our favorite resources is the book Spiritual Companioning, which is full of practical wisdom for developing deeper relationships within church, ministry, and everyday life. The exercise below is one of many in the book. Invite a friend, your spouse, a sibling, or someone close to you to do this with you, and notice how you both experience and respond to your conversation. These are also great questions to keep in mind anytime you get together with a close friend.
"Using Reflective Questions
1. Agree with a friend that he [or she] will share something about his [or her] spiritual life.
2. Listen carefully and, as appropriate, paraphrase what you are hearing.
3. As the story unfolds, ask a few reflective questions, including the following and one or two of your own:
1. What was that like for you?
2. What was your experience (of that event or moment)?
3. What were you feeling or thinking as this was happening?
4. What are you experiencing now?
5. How does this (or has this) affected your life?
6. What do you desire from God in this situation?” (quoted directly from Spiritual Companioning, Reed, Osmer, and Smucker, p. 24)
FRIENDSHIP EXAMEN
Now, we’d like to invite you to take a moment to notice and thank God for the friendships in your life. We’ve created a unique prayer of Examen tailored to helping you notice the meaningful relationships in your life and how they’ve impacted you most recently. Click the button below to download your own free copy of our Friendship Examen PDF!