Please bear with me for a little bit as I shake the rust off my writing skills. As the younger generation would say, “It’s been a minute.” I don’t think that I have written a blog for many years now (aside from our annual family Christmas letter, and shameless plug, let me know if you want added to the list). It’s not that I stopped writing because I didn’t enjoy it, or that I stopped learning and growing in God’s Word. Life just got busy. The last one that I wrote was in March 2019. Now, not that you care to hear my excuses, but here they are anyway… Since March 2019, I got married, changed careers from social work to farming, had not one, not two, but three beautiful baby girls, bought and remodeled a farmhouse, started working part-time at Berean, built and now operate a commercial hog barn. The list goes on and on, but I think you can get the point. I am pretty confident that you get the point because I am sure life has also been busy for you. It’s easy to slip into the busyness of life and not look back. To slowly but surely lose your margins on time. Next thing you know you’ve spent the last five years working, spending time with your family, doing good things, but not really resting. It feels like you do all of that in a rush. Now, there are times for vacations and times to relax, but those often go by too quickly because we’re already thinking, planning, and anticipating what we need to do as soon as we return home. Now, I have to be honest with you because I could continue on this topic of the busyness of life and not having margins in your time and days, but it’s honestly not what I intended to write about (believe it or not). So, I guess I will save that one for the next five-year blog (just kidding, hopefully, it isn’t that long). I think the rust has been knocked off enough to get into what I actually felt led to write about…
Through the busyness of life recently, God has been impressing on me the importance of community and friendships. (Groundbreaking topic, right?) Community is something that we all have, but I think more often than not, we don’t always get everything out of it that we should. (For that matter, I don’t think we usually put as much into it as we should either.) This idea of community has come up in numerous sermon series, youth lessons, young adult studies, and life experiences lately. It goes without saying, the community that we have around us is important. Now, normally I would have a specific Bible verse or passage that the Lord used to speak to me or to encourage me or challenge me. This time, there are sooo many verses or passages that I could give as examples, it’s hard to choose just one. A main one though, that keeps returning to me is found in Luke 5:17-26. Take a minute to read it.
Amazing, right?? Picture it. Jesus is packed into this home, full of grown adults, they are listening to every word he has to say. These people have come from all of the local towns, so it wasn’t just a small gathering. There was no room to get in the house, no room to even stand outside the door. It was impossible to get in. Now, imagine a group of guys carrying a friend on a stretcher, trying to get in this house. Obviously, it was not going to happen. Even for one of them to let go of the stretcher and push their way into the home was unlikely. So they gave up, they said sorry, pal, you just wait out here while we try to get as close as we can so we can hear what he has to say… No, they persevered. I would love to be a listening ear on that conversation between the friends. I imagine it would go something like this, “What do we do now? We can’t get inside!” “Well…we could try the roof?” “The roof?? Are you serious? How are we going to get him on the roof? And what are we going to do once we are on the roof? What if we all fall through? Then we are all going to need to be healed!” “I mean, Jesus is kind of known for that…that is why we are here…besides, what’s the worst that could happen?” They knew the man inside had the power to heal, they had heard of the miraculous things that he had already done. So they got creative and took to the roof. Now, try to imagine carrying a stretcher up onto a roof that I am sure did not have the easiest access and then having to make a hole without falling through. Not a simple task! But they did it. They cared for their friend so much that they were willing to put themselves (and everyone in the home for that matter) in danger. They trusted that getting their friend in front of Jesus was so worth it that they did the difficult thing. They were willing to go to extreme lengths for their friend because they knew Jesus was his only hope.
You can read the rest of the story for yourself, but here’s a spoiler, Jesus heals the man. His buddies are still up on the roof looking down in and Jesus tells him to get up and walk out of the house! What an incredible display of friendship. The company that you keep is so important for your well-being, not just mentally and emotionally, but spiritually. This guy had been paralyzed with no hope to walk again until his friends brought him to Jesus. Are you picking up on what is important here? We need a community that is going to go the extra mile in order to get us closer to Jesus. We need friends who will courageously lay us at the feet of Jesus, with the expectation that He knows what is best for us. We are not meant to do life alone, no matter what season of life you may be in.
It has been neat for me to witness the truth of this message shared in a variety of different settings, in front of people from different walks of life. To the youth and younger generations, this message really emphasizes the importance of having good, Christian friends who will help guide you in the right direction, making decisions based on the truth of the Gospel. For the college-aged generation, it is a very similar lesson but also adds depth to the idea of searching out those friends who can and will carry you when you need it. There is a deeper connection to the idea of having a smaller circle, so to speak, when it comes to friends. For myself, and others in the young adult or young families category, I connect with this message on a different level. I imagine my children as the ones who need to be brought before Jesus. I need the help of my wife and our close friends to come alongside me and pray for them, raise them up in the way they should go, and give me Godly wisdom on how to handle difficult parenting decisions and circumstances. For the church, it looks like bearing one another's burdens, practically meeting the needs of those in the congregation, being the body of Christ. The truth of the message can be applied in so many different facets of life.
However, as true as it is and in all the numerous ways that it can be applied, there is still a part of it that I feel often gets overlooked. It is the idea that we, as individuals, need to do our part in the lifting and carrying of others as well. We oftentimes relate to the paralyzed man, being the person who needs the help, the prayers, and the healing, but we underemphasize being the friend who diligently, carefully, and boldly prays, encourages, and disciples our friends. We love having the help but are slow to be the help. We should be daily lifting our spouses, children, and friends up in prayer, placing them at the feet of Jesus. We should be quick to lend a helping hand, a warm meal, and an open door to those who need it. If we want to have the type of friendships and community that help meet our needs, then we need to be the type of friend that does those same things for others.
If you have made it this far, thank you. I mentioned that it has been a while since I have actually sat down and intentionally taken the time to write out what God has laid on my heart. If I am being honest, this short blog has taken me days to complete and even longer to actually post publicly. It has been a process of finding moments in each day to write a little bit at a time. I apologize for some of the rambling and lack of coherence in parts of it, but I hope that it is an encouragement to you. I hope and pray that you have friends in your life who will take you closer to Jesus, and I also hope that you are the friend who is bringing those in your life closer to Jesus as well.
