Tuesday, April 22, 2003

 

Unconditional Love Series

 

Matthew 15:13 “Every plant that my heavenly Father  has not planted will be pulled up by the roots.” 

 

No One Goes to Heaven Alone

 

True friendships are never easy to find.  However, all our lives we must be willing to extend and accept the gift of friendship.   It is in human relationship that we find who we are meant to be.  By loving and being loved we discern much about ourselves and are able to go beyond ourselves in love.  

 

Thomas Merton, the contemplative Trappist monk, was for a time, a hermit in the Kentucky hills at the Abbey of Gethsemane.   He said, “No man goes to heaven alone.”   I believe he is speaking the truth.  The journey of life is best shared if  we do so with people who are our friends.   Thomas Merton writes that he learned the lesson at Columbia University.  He writes in his book, The Seven Storey Mountain, “Strangely enough, it was on this big factory of a campus that the Holy Ghost was waiting to show me the light….and one of the chief means…..through which he operated, was human friendship…..God brought me and half a dozen others together…..and made us friends in such a way that our friendship would work powerfully to rescue us from the confusion and misery in which we had come to find ourselves.”  

 

Friendships are hard.  I have invested sometimes in friends who I should not have.  I have this tendency to blind loyalty which has not always been good in my choosing of friendships.  As the text tells, sometimes people are not as we see them; they are indolent, insensitive, and selfish and sometimes we are hurt by them.   If we invest in a person who hurts us it may kill our souls and make us bitter or we may thank God for the good they brought us and move on with our lives.   I believe I should have been more diligent about asking for God’s guidance in the matter of friendship and resolve to do so in the future.   Just as we can be hurt by some people, others can restore our souls.  

 

Jesus said, in John 15:15, to his disciples shortly before going to face the crucifixion “I do not call you servants any longer……I have called you friends.”  If we decide to offer ourselves in Christian friendship to others we can give and gain a great gift.  

 

It is easy to think that who we befriend and accept friendship from is about our affinity for them.  Perhaps, as Christians it should be more about God’s direction rather than our own.  In being a Christian friend, friendship is in a whole new dimension.   Let us try to seek and be Christian friends. 

 

Prayer:

Dear God, help us to pray as we choose our friends.  Amen.