I made a friend when without having met her before, I picked her up as she was walking in the rain on a wintry day 21 years ago. She wasn’t quite a total stranger – I recognised her as a new mum at our current school, and obviously she recognised me as well so she hopped in the car and directed me to her home which she was about halfway through the journey toward.
She invited me in for a cuppa and I was conscious of twin tugs. One, the baby in the back seat who would normally have gone straight home for his morning nap – and two, that maybe it would be good to make a new friend. So I told a still-persistent untruth and said “just a quick one”.
Well…
We 3 left at the end of the day to go collect the rest of our children – the ‘baby in the back seat’ missed both his sleeps and played delightfully and contentedly ALL day long on her floor while we pair of mothers wove in and out of life stories.
As I walked in her door that first day I found myself surrounded by objects of faiths – many faiths – all around me. Aesthetically it was very beautiful but having grown to know both the power and the forbiddenness of much of it I had an intake of breath as I moved to her table to have a seat.
While I
felt so conscious of all these things, I was also conscious that I felt so easy
in her company and in the contentment of the little one playing on the floor.
She was a person (still is) of incredible depth and life experience which she
was amazingly and refreshingly open about.
One of the things I’ve loved about her is that she had no fear of asking big
and deep questions – so we went right into a zone of conversation and trust
that some friendships never enter.
In the course of the day she asked me what I thought and believed about some of the items in her home.
She’d been hurt by other Christians who had either refused to stay there or who had read her a riot act about these possessions and stated most categorically that she should not have them. She should burn them and denounce them – but she didn’t know WHY.
She had been stunned at the brashness of these people, bruised by their harshness and bewildered at their lack of explanation.
I’ll talk to her about that again one day as now I wonder if that was part of how ‘iron sharpens iron’ or of ‘God working all things together for good’ as it did bring awareness about which she then sought answers for – though the seeking came from her heart – an evidence of God’s drawing of her.
So among the sharing of stories came the sharing of why these things as objects of faith and trust didn’t belong in Gods story, why some held a misplaced trust and why in fact some of them were dangerous due to their spiritual connotations.
We both ate up that conversation as we each asked question after question – and so began an amazing friendship.
Living a Christian life is… drum roll… not about looking morally/spiritually/culturally or even sub-culturally – acceptable on the outside – it’s not about anything external – unless the external changes are driven by response to God in our heart of hearts.
Anyway – on that day she said something very profound that has come to me over and over and over again.
It was this.
—“Don’t they see I’m coming toward God, not away from Him”—
That one line has spoken to me in countless settings.
And she did do that.
She fully placed herself in His hands.
Though not that day… I’m sure she inched a bit further forward Him but the surrender came later.
And it wasn’t with me – God enabled to her find a community of Believers that included me but was not in one pre-existent chunk but smattered and pieced from here and there.
And she came to Him. It was beautiful, it was painful, it was messy.
But since then she has peeled off all the external things her early visitors had pointed out and more besides – as she grew to understand the lesser and oppositional power that each belief system held. It happened as the areas of misplaced trust were opened, revealed and rooted out of her heart. The heart root gone – the external followed. And all of that went of her own free will with a heart full of engagement and a real and Living Faith in Someone Greater.
When the pair of us visit now, two decades later, it is very like that first day in some ways. An easy connection with never enough time to go to all the depths we want. And it’s never a quick cuppa.
For years I’ve regularly gone to her for insight on belief systems that she’s waded through and seen firsthand – but held them up in Gods revealing light.
When the pair of us visit now, two decades later, some things are starkly different.
There are no more babies playing on the floor.
None of those externals are present – the internal change worked its order.
And the last time I spent a day, we sat on her porch in the breeze of a stunning spring day, an open Bible on each lap as we each shared what we’d been learning.