What a Friend

Exactly one year ago tomorrow, my sweet husband and best friend in the whole world gave me my Oswald Journal. I was going through a very difficult time in my life and it was wearing thin on all of us. I needed to renew my relationship with God and I needed something that would shed a new light on ancient words that had ceased to live for me. I had been taught procedures for having a relationship with Christ; things like, "Let Go and Let God" and "What Would Jesus Do?" I was instructed in behaviors that would hopefully lead me to a closer walk with my Creator and The Lover of my soul. But for a lifetime I had tried these behaviors, hoping all the while that no one would notice that I was only acting.

Don't get me wrong. I believed whole heartedly in God. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that He is holy and creator of everything. I knew I was a "sinner" and that that meant I was unacceptable to him. I knew that he made a way for me to be acceptable to him by sending Jesus, God Incarnate, to die on the cross for my sins. I knew all this. But somehow it didn't have an incredibly huge effect on my life. He was still distant and incomprehensible. He was still the God of Angel Armies- something I had no context for. And His love was something that escaped me all together.

Today's installment (my final one) in Oswald is about friendship; the kind of friendship we dream of; the kind we hope we'll have with someone someday; the kind that many of us have given up on ever experiencing. It's a kind of friendship that is so intimate that the friends think each other's thoughts, feel each other's emotions. It's not a friendship that brings grocery store flowers to cheer you up on a day that everyone knows is difficult for you; it's the kind of friendship that brings you daisies, or daffodils, or irises, or wisteria on daisy or daffodil or iris or wisteria kinds of days. It's the kind of friendship that even knows when it's a dandilion day. It's when one friend knows the other so intimately that great feats of blessing hold no candle to the tiny, secret joys.

It's this tiny, secret joy friendship that we can have with God. We spend our lives pursuing the great big blessings, the prayers of Jabez- and yes, God is capable of providing those. But when that's all we look for, we miss out on the beautiful gifts he has for us in intimacy; the special gifts he can give when he knows us well. And likewise, we miss out on giving back to him the secret desires of his heart; the things we could only know by being intimate with him.

Now this is eternal life: that they may know You... John 17:3