Thirty Years in a Thousand Words
Sometimes There’s Just That Person
Sometimes there’s just that person, someone you just click with. Maybe it’s shared interests or similar backgrounds or possibly even a common predicament, but you just seem to view the world through the same colored lens. We’ve all met people like that, they become the close friends that get to meet you, the real you, without pretense or dissembling. The ones you can say any fool thing to and they won’t laugh at you. Those people who make you feel connected in this crazy world and whose absence makes you feel a tiny bit more alone.
I lost one of those recently and it’s been hard. He was my closest friend of the last thirty years and he died unexpectedly at sixty eight years old. I’m sure that sounds ancient to the young but to us in our late fifties, it’s a little too close for comfort. After the shock wore off I was terribly saddened by the fact that I hadn’t spent more time with him in recent years. We’d both had some hard years recently and they had left scars. We had a little falling out and were just now beginning the journey of reconciliation. But even early in the journey, it had picked up where we left it and it was like we hadn’t been apart at all.
We spent most of our friendship running from God and our own personal demons. We ran together and we ran apart but somehow that journey through hell forged a bond that wasn’t clear to me until I came out the other side. He was a guy who would blow your mind with his kindness and have you pulling your hair out the next minute. I don’t want to canonize him because, like us all, he was deeply flawed, but it was easy to be envious of how people loved him. The day before he died I remember thinking that I needed to call him and man, how I regret that I didn’t. But we get so busy with things, running around trying to get all our marbles lined up in a row. Dreaming of when it will all slow down, only to sometimes find it’s too late. It seems such a waste.
Scripture tells us that everything we do in this life will be judged one of two ways, it will either have eternal worth or no worth at all. It’s easy to get mixed up in this hurried mess because almost everything the world tells us is valuable, will be worthless in Heaven. There's only one thing that God values highly on this planet and that’s people. How thankful I am that God makes so much of us even though I can hardly understand why, since we make so little of each other.
But I get how hard that can be! I struggled mightily with “who is my neighbor” when I first began following Jesus. If you think you’ve got a difficult neighbor, I’ll put my prison neighbors up against yours any day of the week. In the beginning I just couldn’t accept it, so much so that I dove deep into the origin of the word neighbor thinking that somehow the Bible translators must have gotten it wrong. Crazy right? What I found is that they got it exactly right and followers of Jesus don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing, they are all our neighbors. In prison, it meant even the guy next door who yelled political commentary at the tv every morning at 6am, even though as a convicted felon he couldn’t vote. Today, it even means people who consider a felony a black mark that can never be erased, even by Jesus.
The Bible is explicitly clear about what’s important in our time here and everything else is hardly worth the bother. That’s something my friend seemed to know instinctively and over the years helped me to understand. He banked some serious eternal coin in the last few years helping recovering addicts and alcoholics. It would have been an easy gig for him since he was so easy to like and had plenty of his own scars he could talk about.
One hundred years from now nobody will remember your name or face, but acts of compassion and kindness seem to have a tether to heaven and the results are eternal rewards for those who choose to follow into eternal life. Which my friend most assuredly did. Amazingly enough, after all those years of running, Jesus rescued both he and I in the last few years. I think back over the years and the close calls and am amazed how God has turned all that bad into good.
I have little doubt where my friend sits right this minute so I don’t feel sorry for him……I feel sorry for the ones he left behind. When you die as a follower of Jesus it's a day of beginning, not ending. This tired old bag can return to the dirt because bliss awaits in the presence of the Lord. I keep saying it and it’s true, “If we truly knew what awaited us, we’d be begging God to take us home today!” My friend is there today, singing in front of the throne. I’ll find him when my time comes. It may take me a while though, I’ll have to work my way up close to the throne because I know that’s where he will be.
He was such a fan of these newsletters and I hope he enjoys this one.
