...of Lost Friends

I lost a dear friend this week. We have been close for over 30 years. It has been very had to focus on other things.

My friend - we'll call him John - and I met at University. A brilliant man, but with deep emotional scarring. Petrified that God would punish him for not loving properly. Certain that no-one could love God, and that therefore no-one could assume they had escaped the judgment of God. A man more comfortable with God's wrath than God's love. A man who for those 30 years barely inched his way toward a peace with God. During those 30 years he used his sharp mind and short temper to slash many people's egos and feelings - yet whose own emotional skin was so thin that the smallest of criticism sent him into weeks of distress and deep hurt. Many people came into his life, and many people went.

John - a gifted musician and linguist. A first class mind. Yet a man more comfortable using his hands than his other talents to make a living, as he wrestled with God. John - who believed that anyone making any act of will to serve God as by definition living a gospel of works, even though in his own life he struggled day after day after day to find a way to let God into his life (though he never saw it that way: in his mind, he grew with God only when he was the passive vessel).

And for those 30 years I had journeyed with him, always listening, rarely commenting (not that he would have noticed in the early years: at that time John talked at you, never with you). But John had made progress, and so in recent times I had felt I could critique and beg to differ, all the while remaining friends.

But I was wrong. Sadly, John is gone.

Oh, he is not dead. John is still very much alive. But this last week, after 30 years, I finally felt the lash of his tongue and the venom of his anger, when I responded to a comment he made questioning my commitment to one of my core values. For John, being right trumps relationship. For John, disagreement is a knife wound to a friendship. For John, there can ever only be one viewpoint: his viewpoint. All else is flawed, and must be rejected. So John said goodbye, finally and forever.

So today I pay my last respects to John. He has chosen 'truth' over 'love', having never realized that God is Love, and that we are called ever only to speak the truth in love. Of course truth matters; but so does relationship. How we hold these in balance is our journey with God, and with each other.

Good-bye John. I shall miss you.