Growing Friendship

I read a comic strip recently that made me laugh, and then made me think. Two guys were sitting at an establishment as one was using the wi-fi connection to check his FaceBook. He announced, "I now have 1000 FaceBook friends". To that his friend responds, "How many of them could you ask to help you move?"

I laughed because it is true that you have to love someone to move a sofa bed or heavy dressers. I began to think about how so many people are looking for community. FaceBook is a wonderful tool of connecting people in networks of relationships. People are reconnecting with people from high school, college, and past places they have lived. Our church is using this tool to build relationships within the church, help each other, pray for each other, and build friendships.

And there some funny polls and games. I do wonder how some of you get any sleep as you are achieving the highest levels of play at the latest game.

All kidding aside, it is vital to build relationships at different levels of closeness in our lives. I like to use the analogy of a house to describe it. There are people who walk by your house every day. You may know the names of some, but others are just faces you recognize. Others you meet at the front door, like sales people, delivery people, and casual acquaintances. If someone knows you better, they get to the living room/kitchen. You share a meal, stories, and build solid friendships. Finally, there are the private rooms of your house, the bedrooms. This is for family. There is privacy and boundaries only offered to a select few. If someone you barely knew came into your house, rummaged through your fridge for food, and then plopped on your bed to watch some television, you would have issues with this. People learn to respect the boundaries of the house. The bedroom is not a sexual reference, but rather an indication of close relationships in the home (parents, children, siblings)

Translate that description to friendships and emotional closeness to people. As you have friends and family at these different levels of relationships, it reflects levels of trust, time, and common ground together. We get hurt in relationships when someone violates trust and hurts us. People who do this are often emotionally moved to a more distant place until trust is earned again. Others who build trust are let in more emotionally. Forgiveness is a gift we must offer because Jesus Christ offered it to us. Trust is a reflection of our emotional and relational safety with someone through experience with them.

Balance is important in relationships. If you have one real close friend, and then some hurtful event happens, extended loneliness can occur because it takes a long time to build a deep friendship with someone else. On the other extreme is the person who has many people at the superficial levels, but no one to walk through the hardest times of life with.

How would your relational house be populated? Are there folks at the front walk, front door, living room, and bedrooms? You might want to look at your FaceBook list and see how those relationships would be placed in your house. Whether it is a church, home, work, etc. we want our relationships to have integrity, purity, and be God-honoring. This can happen at different levels of closeness.

Well, that's all for now. Think on that for a while and let me know what you think