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.
Lament as Praise
Grief has been a topic gaining significant traction this year, and for good reason. We’ve faced constant change in every sphere of our lives, and we’ve been hit with a tidal wave of things to grieve, be they big or small, concrete or more difficult to define and articulate. When the world takes a much different--and in many ways a traumatic, tragic, disrupting--direction than we expected, how are we to respond? How do we cry out to God when we feel powerless?
I have found myself grieving the loss of normalcy and a sense of certainty, and there’s a heavy feeling of powerlessness that follows. I may not have actually possessed any more control before, but it’s all the more apparent how very little control I actually do have. And while it’s a good thing to recognize that only God is in control, there is still a grieving process in shedding the false notion of my own sense of control.
And then, things that we have already been grieving may be intensified in this season.
The Earthiness and Wonder of Lament
Truthfully, this post has been in my thoughts for weeks, but the discipline to sit down and actually WRITE about lament has been lacking. I’d like to blame it on the recent power outages here in Northern California (we had FOUR of them, three of which were back-to-back, for a grand total of 9 days without power in the month of October!), or even the very busy season of life and ministry that we’re in this fall. But really, it’s because I’d rather remain distracted than acknowledge the need for lament, even in my own life. It’s so deeply personal, and all too real.
As a culture, we can be quite averse to lamenting. When someone expresses their sorrow or pain or doubt, we can be quick to offer cliche responses like, “Things will get better." "You’ll look back on this years from now and be grateful, because everything happens for a reason.” “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” (I literally cringed as I typed that last one.) Though co-lamenting seems the natural response, most often I give in to the temptation to circumvent or minimize it, as though I have to immediately come to the conclusion that God will somehow make something sweet out of bitter circumstances. I can have such a hard time sitting with another person in their pain that it’s no wonder I’d rather avoid or narcotize my own!