A Bad Times Kind of Friend...

Everyone can point to a buddy list, your facebook page or, the "Five" on your phone to quickly prove that you have friends. Buddies you can chat with. Pals you can call for a movie from time to time. Do they watch your pet while your out of town? Maybe they get your mail. They share things with you and you with them, decorating your walls at home and helping to mark holidays and special moments in your life. Good to have around, right? Always. Ever had a crisis in life? A dark night of the soul maybe? You did something that ruined you. Maybe you didn't do anything but were ruined anyway. Job 6 was my focus of study this morning and I have to be honest it was a brutal discussion on the word "friend." We all know that Job was having problems. He had lossed everything. Literally everything you can loose and keep a pulse. Listen to the words to his friends in Job 6.

14-23 "When desperate people give up on God Almighty, their friends, at least, should stick with them. But my brothers are fickle as a gulch in the desert—one day they're gushing with water from melting ice and snow cascading out of the mountains, but by midsummer they're dry, gullies baked dry in the sun. Travelers who spot them and go out of their way for a drink end up in a waterless gulch and die of thirst. Merchant caravans from Tema see them and expect water, tourists from Sheba hope for a cool drink. They arrive so confident—but what a disappointment! They get there, and their faces fall. And you, my so-called friends, are no better—there's nothing to you! One look at a hard scene and you shrink in fear. (The Message)

Ouch! Fickle, inconsistent, refreshing one day absolutely useless the next, looking good from a distant with great promises, running at the first sign of something hard...I am one of Job's so-called friends. For one, I shrank in fear of your depression. I should have sat in silence with you but I ran. Another, I humilitated you in a moment I should have honored you. I have recoiled from others in self-protection. I have no idea what "longsuffering" means. I fear at times being faced with choices that cause great pain and sacrifice to myself or way of life, in order to save another. I want to believe my first response would be to deny myself and face death for another, but I am severly out of shape, out of practice. My record stinks, if it were baseball I wouldn't hold a job coaching t-ball in Antarctica. When faced with the simplest of sacrifices for the kingdom I fail, so there's no way I stand an ice cube's chance in hell at succeeding...Right?

This verse isn't here to defeat me. Its not here to kill my spirit so that I isolate myself as the leper of friendship. "Untouchable." "Don't bother with this one." Its here to point me to the only one who did it right. If you knew what I did in my heart over the the last 24 hours, yet He was waiting on me this morning when I got up. He knows what I did, and He still met with me. He knows my record, ever loss, yet called me to be on His team. More than that, to coach. Unbelievable.