My sweet Sammy –
I dropped you off at “school” today for the second morning
in a row. This morning we were on time! Yesterday the church receptionist may
have scolded us for being late and I may have unknowingly picked you up during
nap time, earning us another scolding look. The good news is that you’re so
cute no one holds your crazy mama against you J
Your teacher put you on a play mat while I signed you in and you immediately
started babbling to all the toys – I’m so glad that you are liking school. It
makes it so much easier for me to drop you off. I hope you know that I miss you
and I’m so happy to see your smiley little snuggly self when I pick you up!
I am excited for the day when I pick you up and you tell me about the friends
that you made.
Friendships may be
one of the most rewarding things in your life – as CS Lewis (a very brilliant
man) wrote in one of his books:
“I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no
man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself
(for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of
those things which give value to survival.” – The Four Loves
There are many bible verses about friendship
as well – while a good many of them are found in Proverbs (an Old Testament
book written by very wise men), Jesus talks about friendship in the Gospels and
his disciples and followers talk about friendship in the New Testament as well.
They teach us about the benefits of friendship, they warn us to steer clear
from investing in certain types of friends, and they instruct us on how to be
good, safe friends to others. Some of the most beautiful verses on friendship
are actually statements made by Jesus that tell us about our identity in Him.
He doesn’t call us slave, or servant, but friends. He invites us into
relationship with Him and His Father; into relationship with the Trinity. It’s
a friendship in which we can have complete unity with the Trinity; where we can
be fully known and know God Himself as Jesus does.
There are a few things I hope you
learn early on in your life. I hope you
learn them much more quickly than I have in mine, but I also hope that you are
a continual learner and a humble teacher to others. One of the things I hope you
learn early is that friendship is a gift and a blessing. It is not a duty that you feel forced into,
it is something that you choose to participate in. I say this because there are
two great enemies of healthy friendships – there are more, but I think these
two are pretty foundational to all the other problems we experience in
relationships. If we are going to experience healthy friendships that are life
giving, then we must guard against these two enemies that can both prevent us
from being a good friend and hinder our friendships from healthy, life-giving
growth.
At the core of all of our sins or
shortcomings is pride. It’s that ugly thing that rears its head and says that
we are better, stronger, wiser, more capable than God. Pride says, “I am going
to do things this way, because I think it’s better than doing what God has told
me to do.” Or “I am going to live this way, because I don’t think that God
really knows what He’s talking about in this situation.” Etc. Pride often looks like us taking our own lives
under control, believing that we can do a better job at being god than God
Himself. This trickles down into fueling selfishness, greed, and a myriad of
other struggles that hinder us from being the friends that Jesus has called us
to be. It trickles down into two specific enemies that will sabotage healthy
relationships in our lives if we are not careful to guard against them: Insecurity
and Victim Mentality.
Insecurity is something that
everyone struggles with on some level. It’s that feeling of being slightly
uncomfortable in your own skin, of questioning yourself and wondering if you’ve
got what it takes, if you’re enough, etc. Insecurity often looks at the world
around you and goes – “Man, they seem to have it all together and I don’t – not
even close! I’m not as ______ as they are. I’m not enough as I am to be
_________.” Insecurity leaves you
looking to others for your identity and constantly adapting who you are, what
you are interested in, and how you act in relationships just to be accepted.
Insecurity enslaves you into this trap of perfectionism, fueling this false
belief that if you can just be better, funnier, smarter, or _______ than you’ll
finally be worthy of acceptance, love, and secure friendships. What insecurity
does not tell you is that it’s like the wheel in a hamster’s cage. Hamster’s
love jumping on the wheel and running for exercise, but they never go anywhere
and they can’t easily stop once they start running without getting tripped up.
When we allow the lies that insecurity whispers in our ears to take root in our
heart and drive our actions and beliefs, we will constantly be striving to
reach a destination which the wheel will not take us. It is a vicious,
never-ending, energy-expending pursuit to find security because it is based on
the whims of fickle humans. The truth is, secure friendships are never built on the foundation of
insecurity.
The other enemy is a victim
mentality. It often stems from debilitating insecurity, but it is most
definitely rooted in pride. Victim mentality is an insidious belief that you
are the product, the victim, of your circumstances and that you don’t hold any
personal responsibility for your actions or beliefs. It closes the door to any chance of
constructive criticism and any hope of genuine restoration in your
relationships because everything is always the other person’s fault. When you are a constant victim, no one can
win with you unless they are telling you everything you want to hear, doing
everything they want to do, and often it is still not enough for you to be
pleased with your friends. When you are friends with a constant victim, your
feelings are never valued or validated, you cannot be honest without dramatic
conflict, and you will never win or please them. A victim mentality enslaves
you in the loneliest of prisons, leaving you by yourself with festering wounds of
bitterness and unforgiveness. Where insecurity leaves you striving and changing
to earn acceptance, a victim mentality will leave you hardened and unyielding
to change. Rather, it will demand that the world around you change, cater to
your every sensitivity and proclivity, and practically demonize it when it doesn’t
meet your expectations. It whispers lies such as, “They just don’t understand
me. They don’t love me. If I can just find someone who understands me…” that
take root in our hearts that will eventually burden and suffocate every
friendship, further fueling the identity of “victim.” The truth is, understanding and
healthy friendships can never be present where victim mentality is allowed to
exist.
Insecurity and victim-mentality
fuel self-absorption and distrust. You become so focused on yourself – whether or
not you are accepted, how you need to adapt, or your own need to be understood
and remain unhurt that you have no room to focus on others. It creates this
self-fulfilling prophecy in which your fear of rejection or of hurt actually comes
to pass because you never allow yourself to be your true self or open to
personal growth. Often we mask who we
are for fear of rejection, but that only means that the friendships we do have
are ones rooted in rejection – the worst kind of rejection – the kind in which
you reject yourself. Not only does it fuel self-absorption, but it also fuels
distrust. You’ll never fully trust that you are accepted, you’ll never fully
trust that the other party is safe with your heart, you’ll never fully trust
that you loved as you are. When we don’t trust, we close ourselves off as a
form of protection. This creates a wall that will inevitably create distance in
the relationship, and distance that continues to grow will eventually be the
death of a healthy friendship which will feel like rejection. So the very thing we feared – rejection – will be the very thing we
experience when we allow insecurity and a victim mentality to take root in our
friendships and relationships.
At some point in your life you
will struggle with both of these issues. It won’t always look the same, but in
some form or fashion we will all struggle with insecurity and a victim
mentality for the course of our lives. Why? Because we were wired for
relationship and community, but in our sinfulness we’ve skewed that design. We
look to each other for our identity rather than our Creator, and it’s easier to
scapegoat our shortcomings than stare at our broken mess of humanity and own
it, admitting that we aren’t perfect and that we are in need. We dislike being
in positions of being in need, because it forces dependence on and surrender to
something or someone greater than us – and that feels like slavery. The reality
is that we are all slaves to something or someone – we will be for our entire
lives. Want to know who has mastery over you? It is whatever or whomever you
give authority. When we choose “independence” – we’re really choosing to be
enslaved to our broken attempts to control our lives, and that is ultimately
choosing to be enslaved to others because they decide if we’re ________ enough.
When we choose to surrender and depend on Jesus, we’re really choosing the
opportunity to walk in freedom. It’s an incredibly freeing thing to own our mess, leave it at the
cross, and walk in the truth of who we are in Christ. Choosing anything else
will leave us running from or wallowing in our brokenness – and that will
prevent the growth of anything whole and life-giving in our lives.
You will never be able to rescue
someone from insecurity or a victim-mentality; that will always come from them
allowing God to work on their hearts. However, you can guard against insecurity
and a victim-mentality in your own heart. If you want to have safe and healthy friendships it will require you to
not only confront your own brokenness, but also lovingly confront the brokenness
of others. It will require that you daily,
sometimes moment by moment, take your insecurities and your hurts before God’s
throne, own them, and then surrender them and allow His truth to reign over you
and your relationships. It will require that you walk in humility, remain open
to the constructive and loving criticisms of others, listen and take what they
have to say before God’s throne, hold it up in the light of His Word, and walk
in obedience to Him. It will require that you walk in courage, love another
more than yourself, walk in integrity, and sometimes that you know when to
lovingly walk away from an unhealthy friend for a season. It will require that
you walk in Divine wisdom, leaning heavily on the Spirit to guide you and work
in you and through you, so that you know how to build and invest in these
friendships in such a way that reveal the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth…because the world needs to see the
beauty and the hope of the Gospel in our friendships and relationships.
My prayer for you is that you
would see your Dad and I model friendship well, not perfectly, for you as you
grow up, and that you would experience relationship with the greatest Friend,
Jesus.
All of my love,
Mom
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