Antidote to Perfection
John Fischer

There's one thing that, more than anything, will cure the tendency we all have to appear like we have it all together when we don't, and that would be a close relationship. You just can't fake it with a real friend.

I wish we didn't have to do this to ourselves. We just don't seem to be able to let go of this need to look like we are better than we are. We walk on water. We have perfect children. God and us are just like this... Humbug.

Here's what we all know, but rarely take advantage of: You can fool some people, but you can't fool everybody; and the ones you can't fool are your best friends. (I suppose you could turn that around and say if you are successfully fooling everybody, you probably don't have any close relationships, and if that's the case, you might want to do something about that.)

In a staff meeting recently, Kay Warren (her husband is that guy who authored The Purpose Driven Life) shared that when she was suffering through the long night of her cancer, her closest friends were the ones that she could tell, “I don't get it. I don't get God's system -- whatever He's supposedly teaching me here. I don't get why I have to learn it this way.” And she remembers now that all they could say at the time was, “I don't get it either, but God is good.”

That's a pretty good response, actually. Job could have used a friend like this instead of the ones he had who were constantly trying out their latest theological theory on his situation while he had to live through the real suffering. Sometimes all you can say is: “Yeah, life is hard but God is good.” Or as my kids would say it: “Life sucks but God doesn't.”

But going back to our antidote… we don't even get this far if we are not honest. If we're not honest, we're not going to get any real help, and we're not going to have any real friends. Canadian folksinger Bruce Cockburn has a line in one of his songs about kicking at the darkness. I believe this is what a good friend does -- sits up with you in your misery and kicks at your darkness. It may not help much, but it's flesh and blood communion. God does touch us in invisible ways, but he uses people, too, and no one's going to be able to do this for us if we don't let anyone close enough to know what we are really going through.

So let's stop boring each other with our supposedly perfect lives, and get down to the godly business of having and being friends who really care.

PDL