Friendships

While listening to a sermon on Job yesterday, I grew increasingly frustrated. Not my old frustration with Job, that it's a story that I can learn from and that has a lot of good lessons for everyone if you can just muddle through the language, but a true frustration with Job's friends. In the past, I was able to dismiss them as just being really bad friends--the kind you should walk away from if ever things get bad. Tim Keller helped me see that Job's friends were either cynical or moralistic...a pretty good example of the reactions I've received. He talked about how everyone says the wrong thing in response to another's suffering. Now, in the past week I've laughed at the websites with lists like "Top 10 things not to say to a person who is sick," but it's true. No one knows what to say--or what to do.

Prednisone is a wretched drug that makes all the bits I don't like about myself come to the forefront with a vengeance. My tendency to want things to be neat when I'm upset has now turned into an obsession with organization. My tendency to despair without a visible goal has turned into an understandable depression without a focus on finishing school and applying for teaching jobs in the fall. My tendency to retreat inward instead of letting people see my pain has, to my detriment, succeeded in virtually cutting me off from everyone except the most persistent of friends and family.

In the past, when I realized a group of friends had failed me, or was, as I liked to term it "leeching" and not pouring back into me, I would bow out gracefully...slowly but surely removing myself from the scene. I have several very good friends that have consistently been there when I needed them, but ours aren't friendships that require seeing each other every day. It's the interim friendships that are hard to lose--the ones I saw several times a week before getting sick, that say well-meaning things like "If only you lived closer I'd come visit you." My immediate reaction is, "A HA--I am a better friend to them than they are to me, I should continue my retreat." Thankfully, my mom is a wise lady and reminded me that we should always try to be better friends than what we receive in friendship from others.

What a hard statement that is! My immediate reaction when reading Job is to make it as personal as possible... to name which of my friends has been a moralist, which has been a cynic, which has discouraged me in their attempt to figure out what God has planned in all of this. In a way, that's the Job story I remember. But this book contains the essence of what I believe; God shows up and reminds Job of how very big God actually is. In beautiful poetry the strength of God's power, nature, and person are defined. Keller reminded the listeners that it's just as arrogant of us to say that God isn't involved in something as it is to say that we know why God is doing something. (He was far more eloquent, but hey)

I have no idea why I'm the one who is sick. My mom wishes it was her and makes statements about how much more sense it would make if it was her often. I had a friend tell me over a month ago that of all the people she knows, I'm the one that can handle this the best. I chose to take that as a compliment. I've tried to say "well, this will make me a better teacher because ______" Other people around me have tried to say that this will give me more *insert positive trait here* In all of this, we as feeble human beings are trying to wrap our little minds around something that, by nature, we can only see an iota of. The truth of the matter is, we live in a world that was broken by the entrance of sin. That brokenness manifests in cruelty, in evil, in death, in fear, and in sickness. I believe that my God did not think of me before the beginning of time and create me to be sick or even to die. I was created to live in perfect Harmony, and because of what Jesus did on the cross, and continues to do in my life, I will get through this aspect of our broken world, and I will experience that Harmony.

At Young Life camp last summer, I was explaining to one of my girls the difference between Heaven and Hell. If Hell, like CS Lewis says in 'The Great Divorce" is people moving farther and farther away from each other, isolating themselves from others because they've chosen to isolate themselves from God, then Heaven is like the best party ever. Perfect unity with God and other people. No crying, because there's nothing breaking up the harmonies. I told that girl the truth, that I like her a lot, even love her, and want to party with her someday.

Part of me can't wait until a time when my friends don't have to try and say the right thing, when I won't get frustrated with myself or others when I don't see them as much as I'd like, when we just get to party together in perfect harmony. The truth is, I can't think of a single person I've come in contact with in my entire life that I don't want to enjoy that party with someday. And as much as it sucks to be sick, and even though this could be something I deal with for the rest of my life, there are people that need to know what Job knew and what I'm learning--being in conversation (even when the conversation mostly consists of me asking why) with the God of that party is worth it. I'm not done here because I still have friends who don't know about the party. Job never turned his back on God--that's how I want to be remembered. Oh, and Job's friends? The last bit of Job 42, right before God restores Job's fortunes, God tells them that Job "will pray for you." May I be one to pray.