Recovered In Christ

I’ve had many “friends” in my life who’ve been desperate for me to share my weaknesses and struggles with them – not to bear them with me or pray for me and help me (although it usually comes under the guise of that), but rather as a sick exercise in satisfying their own conscience. Somehow if they can get me to share with them some brokenness and serious fallibility it lets them off the hook in their own conscience, they can relax a little bit on the race and they enjoy a secret pleasure of seeing my crown “tarnished”. Although this guilty pleasure borrowed from Judas’ treasure chest is something that EMO’s will deny and take to the grave if possible.

This, of course, is a co-dependent’s sick attempt at intimacy. They confuse competition for camaraderie. Their feelings and self worth are so deeply tied up in their friends’ identity, that they cannot ever experience the true joy that real friendship avails. Self sacrifice does not exist in these friendships – even when they put themselves in a servile position…it is still self serving.

The truth is – the people I trust with my weaknesses and struggles are those who have no secret agenda to feed off of me. They are not waiting for an opportunity to sigh a big sigh of relief and say to themselves “ahh…see…she’s no better than the rest of us!!” They are the ones who would take extreme measures to catch me before I fell…they would love and protect me and put me before themselves whether I was an insane beggar or the Queen of Persia.

Who YOU are is not a reflection of your friends power or weakness – who you are though, is definitely what kind of friend you are to a person in power or in weakness.

We all make mistakes. We’ve all failed our friends – we’ve all fumbled the ball of loyalty – but do your mistakes mirror Peter’s or Judas’?

Ask God to reveal to you your heart.

“Lord, am I secretly gleeful when my friends stumble? Lord, do I listen with an attentive ear to my friends in the hopes of gaining information that will make me feel less threatened by them? Lord, am I so needy and desperate for power that I enjoy a subtle thrill when my friends get knocked down (even a little?), God, make me like Jonathan – give me the love he had for David for my own friends. I pray God, that you would create within me a clean heart, the kind of heart that rejoices with my friends and weeps with them…and endures with them. With them. With them.”

This is the kind of praying I began years ago, that took me out of the isolation that only a true EMO could understand, it took me out of a life of me against “them” to simply me living and walking “WITH” them. It has been balm to my soul. My prayer for you is that God would bless you with friendships that knit your souls together.

“As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father’s house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt. And David went out and was successful wherever Saul sent him, so that Saul set him over the men of war. And this was good in the sight of all the people and also in the sight of Saul’s servants.” 1Samuel 18:1-5