A few weeks ago I was sitting in a coffee shop in Antigua, Guatemala chatting with my parents, catching up with them. It was nice to see them again. It was nice to be able to talk about more than the surface level topics that would come up in our family group chat.
Having been away for so long it was only natural that they were curious about friendships and relationships, not just here but back home too. We got to a point where my mom was sharing some past experiences with long distance.
Iced mocha in hand, my mother looked me dead in the eye and said “I wish I had intentionally maintained friendships with people whose character I really admired and valued rather passively being friends with whoever I was around in the moment.”
Wow she hit me hard with that line.
Throughout my life I’ve been known for taking forever to text back and rarely the one to reach out. For the last several years it’s even been my New Year’s resolution to work on eliminating this bad habit. But unfortunately, as most New Year’s resolutions do, it wasn’t given effort and died after a week or two. I accepted this habit as some sort of quirky personality trait. And I attatched that label to myself because it was easier than recognizing that I wasn’t prioritizing my friendships to a level that corresponded with how much I claimed to care about them.
I look back on the loneliest times in my life and I have to ask myself “was I really alone or did I allow self pity following rejection to cloud my vision against seeing people who really cared about me?” Self pity can manifest in anger making it harder to identify. Admitting that I held this victim mindset, even to myself, requires a level of humility that everything in my flesh wants to fight. But that’s #growth.
Let’s take a look at the love of God. God is love. He is a perfect representation of every type of love. He loves the church the way a husband should love his bride. It says that we are Gods children meaning that he loves us the way a father should love his kids. But I want to focus on the fact that in John 15:13-14 Jesus calls us his friends. Because his love is perfect we can look to him as the example of how to treat people. And one thing I’ve noticed is that he never leaves us. He is never too busy for us. He is always listening and he will lead us when we ask. He isn’t there because he’s obligated to be. He is a God who pursues. He is a faithful God.
If our goal is to look like Jesus and be a reflection of the father then we need to act more like this.
