Friendship With God 3

How is it that we have friendships?  It is not only shared experience, although that is usually the beginning of a friendship.  But we often share common experience with many people that does not grow into friendship.  Growing up in the same household, experiencing the same events, often leads to bitterness and emnity instead of friendship.  When two people enjoy, delight in, the same experience,   friendship grows.

C.S. Lewis says that the basis of friendship is a common interest---two people looking not at each other, but at a third event or object which draws both people with the same interest or passion.  "You, too?" says one.  "I had no idea that you loved......[x].... also!  Isn't it wonderful!  Show me what you love about [x], and I'll share my joy of discovery with you!"  The friendship grows in the mutual joy of exploration in the 3rd interest.

Unlike other kinds of love, friendship welcomes the entrance of a 3rd, 4th, 5th, and even 6th person, for it welcomes and enjoys the enhancement of other perspectives on the object at hand.  When people have a passion for antique cars, they love to "see through" the eyes and minds of others who have the same passion; they love to look together at what they love; they love to share information, history, and stories about the great cars they have known or heard about.  One might say that these people share the same spirit of enthusiasm for antique cars, though their experiences might all be unique.  As they come together to share their experiences, their spirit is renewed and invigorated.

When I talk to another gardener, I love to hear his/ her knowledge and experience with gardening---how she began, what he learned and discovered along the way---and how the garden is now developing.  There is no end to new discoveries and new combinations, new beauties, new joys.

Those who walk with God have the same experience---"You too?  How did you first experience God's love?  What have you learned?  How has He revealed Himself to you?  What fruit has God's Spirit produced in you? "

As a drop of water is enhanced and strengthened by being surrounded by other drops in a vast lake or body of water, so our friendship with God is strengthened, invigorated, and renewed by hearing the experience of others who also know and love God.  Our spirits are renewed and encouraged when we hear stories about how God has acted in the lives of others, how He saved, healed, delivered, developed, and encouraged others who were in the same situation we found ourselves. 

Friendship with God never leaves us alone in a cloister, so to speak,  but always brings us into contact with others who have experienced and loved what we have experienced and loved.  Together we sing, we celebrate, we eat and drink and laugh---when the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men dreaming.  Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.  Then it was said among the nations, "The Lord has done great things for them." The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy ( Ps. 126).

The stories of the Old Testament and those of the New give the people of God a common experience of delivery from captivity, of conquest of threats to their survival and existence, of settling in a common land, just as in America, we have a common experience and a common story that binds us together.  Blacks in America have their own experience and story that bind them together also in a way that others cannot enter.  Many of the experiences are painful, but overcoming those experiences together is joyful.  Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, Indians---all have ethnic experiences that bind them to one another in special ways.  Over all that could separate us from one another is the love of God that binds us back together in friendship with Him.  Those who have no love of God in their hearts are condemned to be forever outside the experience of those who do.