Friends. Do you have any? Is that still a thing?
This week I have a wonderful friend
coming to visit. We’ve been buddies for over 40 years now. We met in college and while there I wouldn’t even have said we were really friends yet. He was a senior, I was a freshman. He was my RA at the time. He used to come into our room and turn our stereo down at night, from three on the settings to 1.5! Just as a joke. He was funny and we needed that back then. By the end of the year, he asked me to room with him on our yearly choir tour. So, by the end of that year, I would say we might have called each other friends. But truthfully if we hadn’t seen each other again it wouldn’t have been surprising.
In fact, we really didn’t see each other much until I came back from seminary, almost 8 years later. I was serving a church about seventy miles away from where he was serving a church and our DS appointed him to be my mentor. And I was impressed by his care for what I was going through. Those first few years of ministry can be pretty rough. I made a lot of mistakes, and he helped me work through them. I was impressed with how willing he was to listen. He would often make the drive over to my small town and spend a half day with me just figuring out just what ministry was. He would make jokes about my town. He wondered if you had to stop at hand painted stop signs. (We had four of them…the only ones in town!)
I don’t know, was he a friend then, or just a good mentor?
Later that year Cyndy’s mom, Jocelyn, died. I was asked to officiate the funeral. It was a big deal. I felt like a kid in fifth grade singing my first solo at contest. Palms sweaty, sure I’d forget my words. (Side note: in fifth grade I forgot the whole second verse and just froze there while the piano played on. For the third verse I was still so nervous I sang the first verse again. I was a mess. Partly because no one was there to hear me. A more popular kid was singing at the same time.). That’s how I felt as I got up into that pulpit. I was a mess. But as I looked over the crowd, there in the back was Rick.
And let me tell you at that moment he wasn’t a mentor anymore. He wasn’t the old college bud you hit the bar with for a drink. He was a friend, a forever, true-blue friend.
It’s interesting about friends. I’ve learned some about friendship mainly through my lack of keeping them. The biggest lesson I've learned is that I’m not particularly good at making them and even worse at keeping them. As a kid I moved a lot. So, when I moved, I tended to leave them there. I don’t know why. Maybe it was too hard emotionally, but for whatever reason I never bothered to keep them. I still tend to do that. A piece of advice: don’t be like me! Friends are very precious. Work harder at holding them! They aren’t that easy to replace! In fact, I have found that friendships are one of the toughest journeys I’ve ever been on. I’m not very good at it. I’m afraid I’ve let the Seattle freeze into my own DNA. I do the “hey we should get together” and then never follow through. That’s so Seattle! And it’s so not healthy!
Maybe that’s why we don’t feel intimate in our relationship with God sometimes? We put God in our Seattle Freeze Zone, constantly waiting for us to ring her up for an invite to a back yard we have never intended to show him!
Do me a favor this week. Call up a friend and schedule a lunch, reach across the Seattle Freeze zone, and invite someone into your friend zone. And think about this: every time you open your heart to a friend you are saying a prayer and letting God in too. This week when Rick comes, much of our laughter will be in the presence of the laughing Christ!
Your pastor and friend, working through the Seattle freeze, Brook