A Love Story
A Love Story
By Bonnie McClure
Can I tell you a love story?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about different types of love. Culturally, we are trained quite extensively on familial love – the love we have for family, and romantic love – the love we have for a partner or spouse. Once we enter adulthood, those two types of love alone tend to fill up the majority of our time, schedules, and hearts.
But there is another type of love that is quite important to our social health – the love of friendship. Not only are these relationships important for us to cultivate and integrate for our well-being, they also point to a specific way that we relate to Jesus.
“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).
Indeed, there is a unique kind of transparency within friendship. Perhaps it is because friends do not carry the same emotional and relational entanglements that come with family members and spouses. With my friends, I don’t have to deal with an annoying humming habit of a little brother while I’m trying to read in the evenings. With my friends, I don’t have to step over the same pair of shoes a spouse continuously leaves in the hallway. (Not my spouse, of course…)
With friends, time spent together tends to be more deliberate and intentional, because you (usually) don’t live together.
But while there are lots of people in the world that I don’t live with, there are only a few to which I would bare my soul. These few are the ones I would call my friends. With them, I am willing to be myself because over time, we have cultivated the type of trust and intimacy that allows me to feel safe enough to explore thoughts, feelings, dreams, desires, problems, solutions, and questions, without fear of judgement, shame, condemnation, or ridicule.
Bring to mind the friend you trust the most. The one who knows you so well. The one who you even allow to push back on things you do or say because you’ve come to know they truly want the best for you. They have no ulterior motives, no hidden agendas, no reason to manipulate you. Not only do they allow you to be fully yourself, they celebrate who you are, and also, the transparency is two way: they allow themselves to also be fully known by you.
This level of friendship is an organic exchange of vulnerability, intimacy, and trust.
Now, understanding all of the value this exchange gives you, feeling into the deep gratitude we have for someone we know is in our corner, how wonderful, then, is it that Jesus invites us into this type of love?
My friend Linda. The two of us met in college in the psychology program. She sat right in front of me in our History of Psychology class. We had not known each other that long but she did know I had recently lost my dad to suicide.
One day our class had a well-intentioned special presentation on Suicide Prevention. If you’ve never lost someone to suicide, it is difficult to know exactly how triggering this type of experience can be. It is true that I have had to build resilience as a survivor of suicide loss, because there are references and reminders everywhere.
But especially at this point in time, it was early in my loss, and a class on prevention, for me, only threatened to unleash traumatic spiraling. Can it be prevented? Why wasn’t mine? Did I do something wrong? What else could I have done? Why didn’t any of this work for my dad? And on and on I might go diving head first into the volatile storm of my grief.
Linda must have anticipated this. Without any words, discussion, or prompting, she turned and held my hand for the entire presentation. I have never been so touched by such a simple act of love.
That day, Linda was just being Linda, doing what Linda does. But in this act of friendship, she was also being Jesus, doing what Jesus does.
Jesus comes to us in our greatest hour(s) of need and offers us his hand. He offers us his peace, his stability, his comfort, his strength, he embraces us so that there is nothing we have to endure alone.
But in order to accept this invitation, we must be willing to acknowledge we need it. We must be willing to face the sadness, grief, despair, anger, resentment, wounding, pain, that is there. And because he is our friend, he is willing to go there with us.
When our bodies are sick, we seek medical treatment and care. But the condition of the soul and the heart are much more tricky to deal with, and yet they are connected to the condition of everything we do. “What you say flows from what is in your heart” (Luke 6:45).
For this we need someone who, first of all, sees the heart. “For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).
Jesus not only sees the heart, he will hold the heart, if we let him.
Truly, our hearts are the only thing we have to offer the King of Glory. Sometimes I imagine I am laying my heart at the foot of the cross. It is the only thing I can exchange for what he’s done for me, my friend, my savior, my liberator, my faithful shepherd of life.
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Not his slaves, not his ungrateful, sinful children, not his repeated failure of a creation – his friends.
Christ would lay down his life for his friends. Even though we don’t deserve it, his grace dignifies us by considering us friends even before we ask for friendship. In the same way Linda offered me her hand that day, Christ is the confident initiator of a no holds barred, no strings attached, pure and unmitigated love of friendship. It is up to us to grasp the gift he is offering.
I hope you will accept the friendship Christ is offering. That you would turn to him in times of trouble and celebration, that you would share with him your truest self, that you would hold his hand when you feel like spinning out of control, that you would delight in the small joys he gives us, that you would hold him in your heart and give him yours in the same way we do with close friends we trust.
For there is no greater love than this.
Bonnie McClure is an active member of her Methodist community in Bremen, Georgia. She writes regularly about Christian Healing on her Substack blog, The Pointed Arrow (bonniemcclure.substack.com). Photo: Pixabay (Pexels).