A Very Comforting Thing To Have

"Friendship," said Christopher Robin, "is a very comforting thing to have.”- A.A Milne in Winnie-the-Pooh.

A while back, Karen and I were reminiscing about different times in our lives and the different people that we have shared it with over the years. Some of those friendships teetered on the rim of the totally ridiculous while others have been intense. Each one has left us with memories and some have provided material for me to use to write about... :)

John and Lisa were the first friends that Karen and I had together. We knew them from church before we got married and after we got married we continued that friendship. They really were a unique couple. An interesting piece of trivia about these two was that the same day that they got married before the justice of the peace, John checked Lisa into the hospital for a psych evaluation. I learned that was not the optimum way to start off a marriage. After Lisa got out, their marriage was strained to say the least. Although our friendships continued, it was not exactly mutually beneficial to all of us. They had a habit of asking for favors and were extremely moody. They were always complaining about things and we found that friendship to be very draining. We started going weeks, and then more than a month, at a time when we didn't talk to each other. Then they moved away without us even knowing it. One month they were there, the next month they were gone. We can't help but wonder what ever happened to them but continue to chuckle to ourselves whenever we think about them.

Galen and Tammy were another couple that came into our lives and their friendship will always have a special place in our hearts. Karen, the boys and I were new to McAlester, Oklahoma because I had just accepted a new job with the Department of Army and we had moved there to start a new life. We visited the 1st Assembly of God in town and we were met out in the parking lot by Galen. He instantly became a hit with my boys because he liked to sneak up behind them and "catch/scare" them. It was a game that began almost on day one and continued until we left a year later. Galen and Tammy were what I refer to as extremely intentional friends. They invited us to their home for a BBQ and swimming almost immediately after we moved there. Then they helped us get involved in our local church by helping us get involved in building props and piñatas for the annual "family festival" in October. Because of their intentionality, all of us felt like we really were important "family" to them. Thinking about them always brings a smile to my face.

Although there have been many more friends in our lives throughout the years, these two couples demonstrate two very different types of friendships: convenience and intentional.

John and Lisa were convenience friends. They are classic examples of those types of friends who are only around when it is easy for them and when they get much more from the friendship than they have to put into the friendship. At the time I didn't really realize it, but they started out as convenience friends and never progressed much beyond that. When given other choices, they did not gravitate towards spending time with us UNLESS they wanted something from us. Then they were quick to call to ask us to come over.

Galen and Tammy were the epitome of intentional friends. They put so much effort into making us feel like family. They didn't just talk the talk, they walked the walk. They demonstrated with their lives how God intended real friendships to be.  In hindsight though, I have come to realize that although they were extremely intentional in their friendships towards us, we were not as intentional in return. It wasn't purposeful. I guess I just didn't know how real friends behaved. I thank God that he brought wonderful people like Galen and Tammy into our lives to teach us, but I am ashamed to have to admit that it wasn't until we moved away that I realized how important their friendship had been to us.

But...

We did learn. One of the things that I learned was that not all friendships are going to be intentional. Very few really are and that's ok. Convenience friendships serve their purpose. It allows us to accomplish things with other people that is beneficial without having to commit too deeply on an emotional level. So, convenience friendships are a good thing.

Although very few in numbers, I learned that our intentional friendships are to be cherished and nurtured. These friendships are the ones that I can draw from when I need physical, emotional and spiritual support and ones that my intentional friends can draw from when they need the same. These take a lot of effort and are not to be taken lightly. On the other hand, they are very rewarding and I do cherish my intentional friends. To my intentional friends, and you know who you are...Thank you for being intentional!

And to Galen and Tammy...THANK YOU for demonstrating for us what it means to be intentional friends...

Sticks and Stones

The March 1862 edition of The Christian Recorder had the first documented account of this old nursery rhyme:

            Sticks and stones may break my bones,
            But words will never harm me.

As we become adults, we become acutely aware of how wrong that nursery rhyme really is. Sure, sticks and stones can break bones but bones eventually heal again. Words, once spoken cannot be taken back and can continue to haunt the wrong person for potentially the rest of their lives.

In my early teens, I was excited to finally reach 12 years of age because I was going to be able to join the youth group, which was thriving at our little Church located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California. I vividly remember attending the first youth meeting, just to hear the youth pastor announce that he was resigning and moving away. I was absolutely heart-broken. Hope was restored within a couple of weeks when another young single male layperson decided to take the non-paying position. He took the position and attendance quickly plummeted. Within a few months, only about a half-dozen "drugged" youth members (those drugged to church by their parents) remained. His last great act before he quit as youth pastor and dropped out of church completely was to write letters to all his remaining youth attendees. After he distributed the letters, he promptly left. Since our parents were still in church, we decided to open our letters and share with each other what he had to say. The first few letters were great words of affirmation, which left me excited to see what he had written to me. I opened the letter and started reading a laundry list of  the faults that he saw in me. I was absolutely devastated. From that day forward, I struggled a lot because I had a low self image of myself. The seed of doubt had been sown.

By the time I reached my Senior year in high school, I had already decided that as soon as I graduated I would find a job and work at a blue collar job the rest of my life. Having worked several summers as a custodian at the high school that I attended, I had come to believe that I probably couldn't do any better. College was only for kids from wealthy families and I wasn't one of those. But God had bigger plans for my life and he was going to use another person to plant yet another seed. That seed was called "hope". This woman told me that I was destined for bigger things and that I could accomplish my goals and dreams. Although I took a stab at college out of high school, it took 15 years for that "hope" seed to sprout and take root. You see, the doubt seed that was planted in my youth had such a strong root system that it would hang on long into my adulthood.

 

Five years after Karen and I got married the decision was made that I would go back to college to finish my education. After the first semester, we ran out of money and I hit a whole new low in my life. I literally cried all the way home that night from work when I realized that my dream of finishing my education had ended and that I was going to be stuck in my present job for the rest of my life. Karen knew something was wrong as soon as I got home and I had to tell her that I no longer was going to have money to go to school on. I had maintained a 3.6 GPA but I was an older student (32 years old) and scholarships were not plentiful for somebody like me. Karen encouraged me to take a leap of faith and after prayerful consideration, we continued on utilizing low interest student loans. By this time, we had learned a valuable lesson about marriage that some folks never seem to grasp. Once a couple are married, God expects them to function as a single unit. As I continued to take classes, it was truly a partnership this time and we have attacked all problems with this methodology since. WE graduated in August 2002 with OUR Bachelors in Accounting and would finish OUR Master's in Management in 2007, just two months before my Dad passed away. In 2003, WE were hired by the Department in Army as a GS-05 and today WE are a GS-13 (equivalent between major and lieutenant-colonel). Leaving spirituality out of the discussion at this point, by man's standards WE have done alright in OUR education and career, however in the background of my mind there is a list of faults that plays from time to time planted by a person in my youth.    

If you have ever read Genesis Chapter One, you have seen the words, "and God said..." That is always followed by an action because when God says something, it happens. Jesus said in Mark 11:23, "Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him." In other words, our words have authority (when coupled with faith) and action can be taken based on them. The whole point here is that words (speech) are very powerful and if they were not, God would not have high-lighted the power within them in his Word (the Bible).

Just as a person planted seeds of doubt in my mind at a young age, we all are able to build others up or tear them down based on the words that we speak to them. We just have to remember that the words we speak to our children and spouses can either build them up or tear them down. It is amazing how many people don't realize the long-term damage they are doing when they say things like, "I knew you wouldn't be able to do that right" or "your not very bright." Sometimes it's not that blatant or obvious, but the intention is negative none-the-less.

The good news is that it is never too late to change the way we speak to our loved ones and others with whom we interact, especially if we have been speaking negative things towards them. If we put into practice the concept that as married couples we are truly a single unit, then it only makes sense that we would want to speak positive things into our mate. By building our mates up, we are strengthening ourselves. Also, by being cognitive that we need to try to balance the negative corrective discipline of our children with an equal amount of affirmation, we strengthen the familial unit by having children who are able to identify appropriate behaviors/actions but also have healthy self-esteems.

Unsafe Distances

We had a simple plan a couple of nights ago. After eating dinner, Karen and I decided to tramp out into a portion of our woods that we seldom visit to retrieve an old tire that we could use to build a "football toss" carnival style game. We still have a half dozen or so tires that had been left there by the previous land owner and we decided to utilize one.

Little did we realize what we were about to experience. I was on point and Karen was about 20 feet behind me as I entered the brush/tree line. All of a sudden I heard Karen yell that something had bitten her. My mind instantly interpreted that as her having been bitten by a venomous snake. I turned to go back to help her and noticed that she was holding her hand/arm. At that point, I didn't have time to even re-evaluate what had just happened. I felt the first pains on my body and I looked around and realized that I was being swarmed by dozens of black and white bald-faced hornets. Without realizing it, I had stepped up next to their nest and the bald-faced hornets are known to be more aggressive than other hornets, wasps or bees. They can each sting multiple times and will chase those that they feel are a danger to their nests long distances to protect it. 

Karen took off running towards the house and I was right behind her. We were still a couple hundred feet from the house when Karen fell face first to the ground. As I reached her to pick her up, I still had a couple of hornets stuck in my clothes. I killed those hornets, helped Karen up and we raced up to our barn. Since we were quite a distance from the hornets by then, they had abandoned their attack and we were now able to evaluate our injuries. Karen had one sting, a skinned up left knee, right thigh and right arm. I had eight stings, all of which were on the right side of my body, all of which were below the waist except for one sting on my lower right back. We then went into the house, applied "after bite" to our stings (which helps relieve some of the discomfort and actually works) and Karen cleaned her wounds. Not wanting to give up too easily, Karen and I went out to the barn to build the game frame anyway. As we were retrieving the lumber from our lumber stack, God allowed us to see a tire that we had all but forgotten about. It was one that was out in the woods before but I had brought up to the house to dispose of. We used it instead!

Because I don't believe that God allows bad things to happen to people for no reason, I asked him last night what was the purpose for all of this taking place. The simple lesson that I learned from this, that could be applied in a spiritual way, is that sometimes bad things happen to good people just because they allow themselves to get too close to a bad situation. They may not even do it intentionally, but they do it none-the-less. Sometimes people are be-bopping along and not paying attention to lurking dangers and then get caught unaware when something bad happens.  They may not really be doing anything wrong, but close proximity is enough for them to get stung. In some applications of this principle, close proximity may not even be a physical thing, but an emotional thing or even the appearance of impropriety.