We all need someone to show us the way. Someone who’s been traveling the road a little longer than we, who’s become accustomed to the strange and sometimes unpredictable nature of the road itself. Someone who’s aware of the high points along the way, making possible their gorgeous vistas for all to enjoy. And someone who’s also familiar with the low points that are coming when we round the next bend, where the floodwaters often rise and where tears have been known to flow.
Discipleship is not tremendously complicated. In fact, Christ showed us its beautiful simplicity when He chose twelve unremarkable fellows to be apostles. These guys weren’t particularly wise in the eyes of the world, but they would change the course of history, because Jesus would show them what life was all about. He would live with them, and journey with them. Eat with them. Laugh with them. Cry with them.
Christ would be for those men love wrapped in human flesh. That would include affirmation and encouragement, and it would also include honest challenge and rebuke when the time was right. They wouldn’t always understand the purposes behind Christ’s every move, but He would never be for them anything other than the faithful friend that each of them desperately needed.
Sometimes, when our world feels upside down, we need someone older and wiser to remind us that “this too shall pass.” We might not believe it when they say it, but we still need to hear it. Because it’s still a fact. An older mom can restore the sanity of a mom with two toddlers still in tow. An older husband can save the marriage of a strapping young dude with a roving eye.
Sometimes, age has nothing to do with it. We just need a friend. A shoulder to lean on. An understanding heart. A listening ear. Someone to celebrate with us the most seemingly trivial milestone. Or someone to weep simply because we’re weeping.
And we always need someone whom we can count on to tell us the truth. The absolute truth. Such founts of integrity may be few and far between. We can’t even measure their value. When it comes to matters of faith, we never get too smart to be reminded of the first and most foundational truths we ever learned. Those reworked lessons, when we need them again, are often the most impactful – as we don’t often realize the spiritual truth from which we’ve subtly wandered.
May the Lord rescue us from the Lone Ranger syndrome! You and I were never meant to go it alone. That’s not how we’re wired. In fact, propping up some prideful notion of autonomy is how we finagle ourselves into the worst kinds of trouble. Honestly, you and I are finaglers at heart. That’s why we need each other all along the way.
The Bible says that “a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12). When I’m holding on by a thread, that’s the kind of thread that I want to be holding. A thread of human friendship, but a thread that’s nothing short of a divine entanglement. When the strongest of gale force winds come howling, such friendship may get frazzled and frayed, but it can hold in the fiercest of storms.
Like we have been so deeply loved, we ought to love one another to death. In Christ, the honor and privilege are ours to love each other all the way home. “Greater love has no one than this.”
Pastor Charles
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