Category Archives: Friendship

I can’t deny it.

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Hollywood and the Bible have something in common: they’re both full of stories, not to mention the colorful personalities populating them. God’s plots and those of filmmakers could be skewed any way the authors choose, but the movie that sells the most tickets is usually the one with the most reprehensible characters in its script. We’d rather see actors make trouble than watch halo-worthy people do everything right.

God knows that, which is why he’s included so many off-kilter stories in the Bible. It’s more of a tell-all book than a goodie-two-shoes tale. He could have shown us only the holy side of his players, but instead he spells out the whole story, even the seedy parts.

How come?

It’s probably to convince us his Word is about real people, people who may have lived thousands of years ago but are really very much like us. Once we buy into that, we can learn from their rebellious behavior (and its resulting consequences) as much as from their cooperation with God. Probably more so.

Lively guys like superman Samson, bully Goliath, longsuffering Noah, first-man Adam, temper-tantrum Jonah, and dancing David are intriguing. All of them got into massive messes, and as we study those exciting (and sometimes far-fetched) stories, we shake our heads and remember what not to do.

When Jesus arrived on the biblical pages, he continued to acquaint us with people who were out-of-the-ordinary, even strange, putting his words and experiences into everyday contexts. Take his 12 disciples, for example, men of all ages, educational backgrounds, and professions. Some were gracious, others abrasive, but as we get to know them, we can see ourselves in their behavior.

Personally I relate to Peter the most. During the 3 years of Jesus’ ministry, Peter was probably about my age, older than the rest of the men and because of that, supposedly wiser. Instead we’re shown an impetuous character who was often reckless in his responses to circumstances. For instance, betraying and abandoning his dear friend Jesus when he needed him most.

In another incident (this one in John 21), Peter plays the lead in a grilling session that takes place at the beach, and I don’t mean on a Weber. Jesus had risen from the dead, and a handful of his disciples had just finished a spontaneous picnic breakfast with him at the edge of a lake.

Peter, probably unsure of where he stood with Jesus after his 3 blatant lies about him (using swear words for emphasis), was no doubt thrilled to be sharing a meal with him again. After they’d all finished eating, Jesus turned toward the impulsive Peter and zeroed in on him with a thorny Q&A session.

(Concluded tomorrow)

Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord.” (John 21:12)

Something to Crow About

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Three year old Skylar lives in a country-like neighborhood with lots of natural wildlife, including a flock of crows. Sometimes they swoop around in a group or congregate in one tree. When that happens Skylar says, “Today they’re having a meeting.”

Recently a crow flew overhead with a “Caw! Caw!”

“Wow!” I said. “Did you see that giant black bird?”

“That’s a macaw,” she said.

“Really?” I said, watching the crow disappear over the trees. “I thought macaws had bright colors.”

“No. They’re black.”

Then she said, “And I speak their language.”

“Impressive,” I said. “How’d you learn that?”

“Oh, I always knew it,” she said. “Actually, I taught it to the macaws.”

Learning languages is tricky. Teaching them is more so. Most of us have struggled to learn the ins and outs of a foreign language during school years, from Latin to French to Spanish and beyond. Biblical scholars work at Hebrew and Greek, and toddlers work to be understood by anyone.

Gary Chapman wrote THE 5 LOVE LANGUAGES, explaining how to communicate best with those we love most. Not only do different generations speak differently, different decades do, too. But that’s not all. There are male-female variations and personality-type distinctions. It’s almost too complicated to figure out, so why bother?

We bother because of love.

When we love someone, we want to understand them better, including foreigners. Despite not understanding at first, it’s good to keep trying. God, the Great Communicator, is hoping we will. His desire is that we all become members of his family, and part of having harmonious relationships is communicating effectively. If we can’t understand each other, we are, in a way, foreigners living together in frustration. The Lord wants us all to “click,” and like all good fathers, he’s hoping his children will get to the place of communicating blessing to each other.

He also wants us to come to him for conversation. The biblical David put it well: “My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me.” And my heart responds, “Lord, I am coming.” (Psalm 27:8) I’ll never get over the fact that God Almighty has an interest in our communication with each other, and even personally, him with me. My longing is to talk to others and to him in a way that will please him, and to accurately understand his language back to me.

And so I’ll keep trying.

I’m also trying to communicate with the crow-macaws as well as Skylar does. Yesterday we were playing in her driveway when she said, “I can ride my bike as fast as the birds fly. And when I yell up to ’em in bird language, they fly where I tell ’em to go.”

Flawless communication, to be sure.

”There are many different languages in the world, and every language has meaning. But if I don’t understand a language, I will be a foreigner to someone who speaks it, and the one who speaks it will be a foreigner to me.” (1 Corinthians 14:10-11)

Messy Business

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While visiting Linnea and family in Florida, it’s been fun renewing relationships with 3 year old Skylar and 2 year old Micah. Little Autumn, 2 months this week, has changed significantly since I saw her last, which was her birth week.

Children are fantastic, but they can also cause lots of trouble. They’re labor-intensive, expensive, loud, and worst of all, they create endless messes. Autumn, for example,  spits-up on shoulders and makes deposits in her diapers. But those messes are small-potatoes compared to her older siblings. Skylar and Micah? They’re in the mess-making big leagues.

Those two can dismantle a room in just a few minutes of creative play. They can also “help” an adult with a 5 minute project that later requires 40 minutes of clean-up. Making messes comes easily. Cleaning up is more like combat.

And then there are us adults. Even the big-league messes preschool kids make are nothing compared to the disastrous ones we get ourselves into with people. They begin slowly and aren’t usually visible to others, but months or years down the road, everyone sees.

Children make messes with sticky fingerprints, but we do something far worse when we let relationships get sticky. And just as children hate to clean up the messes they make, we find it difficult to tidy up our relationships. Picking up the pieces and putting them back together is something we don’t usually want to do, but if we let disheveled relationships go too far, the clean-up becomes twice as hard.

God describes himself as our heavenly Father, our parent, someone who urges us to make things right just like we urge Skylar and Micah to put a messy room back in order. We insist the children get it done, just as our Father pressures us until we do what we know is the right thing.

Today Skylar, Micah and I made a morning project of reorganizing all their plastic bins, putting each plaything back in its proper place. We retrieved puzzle pieces from the garage and plastic people from the yard. Books had been tucked in the play kitchen and necklaces under the couch. The orderly result was children enjoying a sense of accomplishment and fresh enthusiasm for rediscovered toys.

If we keep our relationships in order, the same thing will be true for us… especially if the relationship we’re working on is the one we have with God.

“Now we can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God.” (Romans 5:11)