In my book, Friendship with Jesus, I invite the reader to consider thinking about their relationship with Jesus in the same way they think about and experience their relationships with other people, especially their friends. One of the challenges I faced in my own life in relating to God was that the whole relationship, if I could call it that, seemed to be running on a completely different set of rules and dynamics than anything in my regular life. This made it extremely difficult to understand what I was supposed to do to help this relationship develop. It felt like I was caught in a rather unpleasant binary of “in” or “out”, where “in” meant I was expected to know, trust, love, and serve this God fully and completely, right out of the gate. And the only way to engage with all that was to learn more and do more: read more scripture, learn more theology, pray more diligently. Any developmental “stages” in the relationship seemed to be limited to Lostness → Conversion → Growth (always undefined!). I had spent many years as a Christian and this became more and more untenable.
As I began to think about the dynamics of a real friendship, a different set of categories, or “stages,” came to the fore. The first two, perhaps rather obviously, were watching and meeting. We see someone from a distance, we notice them and are intrigued. Then, we meet. (The rest of the friendship stages will be the subjects of future blog posts).
Watching
We often watch or see our friends from afar before we meet them. Perhaps we are in the same social group, or we share a course in college, or work for the same company. We begin to get a glimpse of what they are like, what kinds of jokes they laugh at, what values and concerns they seem to care about? We can learn a lot about someone by watching them closely, paying attention to what they say and how they live.
This aligned fairly well with my relationship with Jesus. Every time I opened the Gospels I was “watching” Jesus: watching him teach, watching him heal. I had learned a lot this way. We all do. I tell the story in the book of one experience I had watching Jesus as he interacted with children from Mark 10.
I imagined all these kids roaming around, laughing, and climbing onto Jesus’ back, clutching his neck. I was amazed and touched by Jesus’ unabashed joy. His laugh was infectious. He rustled one boy’s hair, tickled a little girl on her arm, bent down to look a toddler in the eyes, and took a crying baby into his arms, blessing each child with his warmth and tenderness..(p.46).
This experience was powerful for me, seeing Jesus living out the love he had for children. I began to see Jesus in an entirely new light, not only as a “saviour” but as a person who loved deeply. It drew me in.
Meeting
Eventually, after we have “watched” someone for a while, we may have the opportunity to meet them. We shake hands and introduce ourselves, perhaps sharing cursory information, where we live, what we do.
This is where the first of many pennies seemed to drop for me. As I set this every day and very ordinary relational dynamic alongside what tended to happen in my spiritual life, I quickly realized that I had not really made it out of the “watching” stage with Jesus. Almost all of my “interactions” with Jesus were from a distance – I watched him in the Gospels, I watched him interact with the disciples and others he met, I watched him heal and teach, but always as an outside observer. Jesus was much more like a celebrity than a friend. I knew a lot about him – I had watched him for years - but we had never really met. This was sobering.
I wonder if you resonate with that?
Imaginative prayer was the vehicle I was introduced to that opened up this dynamic of encounter with Jesus. As I entered into the stories in the Gospels, slowly, very slowly, I found that I was moving beyond watching Jesus to meeting with him, experiencing him as a real person, a real friend.
This kind of knowing, experiential knowing, is core to any relationship. What we learn from watching someone, even Jesus, can tend to remain rather cognitive and intellectually oriented. Real friendship demands experiential knowledge, the kind that comes from looking someone in the eye, holding their hand, listening as tears well up in their eyes. This is the kind of friendship we are invited to share with Jesus. If that seems too good to be true, keep pressing in.
Next time I will talk about the stages of following Jesus and trusting Jesus, two stages that many of us have only thought of as one. Thanks for reading.
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