Friends Show Up

It was a dark and stormy night.

It was Snoopy who first taught me about being a writer in the Peanuts comic strip in my hometown newspaper, The Capital. I’ve always wanted to start a piece that way. Snoopy always started his books with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

It was dark, that night I’m thinking about.  The storm, however, was not outside in the weather, it was inside the room, inside the people, inside Jesus.

I’m thinking about Jesus’ last night with the apostles, with his closest friends. It was the night on which he would be arrested and taken before the chief priests and the Roman governor. It was the night before he was going to be cruelly tortured and murdered.

“Jesus knew that his hour had come” (John 13:1), and he was “troubled in his spirit” (John 13:21). A little later, in the Garden, he would be in great agony, with sweat pouring out of him like great drops of blood. Praying earnestly, he would ask the Father to take away the cup of his wrath that he would soon drink (Luke 22:41-44).

Jesus knew what was coming.

With that storm raging inside him, Jesus looked at the apostles and said, “One of you will betray me.”

“Lord, who is it?” John asked.

Revealing his betrayer to be Judas Iscariot, Jesus said, “What you are going to do, do quickly!”

What a dramatic scene. I imagine the other apostles staring at Jesus, not saying a word. Then, Jesus said, “I have a new commandment for you.”

This is the climax of everything he has shown them and everything he has taught them for three years.

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34).

This is what it means to follow Jesus: love one another. In fact, love for one another is evidence of true discipleship. Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).

And just in case they didn’t get it, Jesus told them two more times before he left for the Garden and his arrest.

 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12-13).

“These things I command you, so that you will love one another” (John 15:17).

Jesus was serious. He wants Christians to love each other. And not just to love in whatever way seems right to us. Twice, he said, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” Christians’ love for each other ought to resemble Jesus’ love for them.

How did Jesus love his disciples?

There are so many ways that Jesus loved, and continues to love, his disciples. Fully answering that could take a book. Maybe I’ll write that book someday. Right now, I want to focus on one of the ways that Jesus loved his disciples. He showed up.

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross “Phil 2:5-8).

Jesus left heaven, became incarnate, and entered this world. When his people were in trouble, he came to them. He is the good shepherd who left the 99 to go after the one who was lost (Luke 15:3-7). He showed up.

One way we can love one another the way Jesus loved us is to go to the one who is hurting, the one who is in need, the one who is in trouble. We can show up.

During my late 40s and early 50s, I medicated years of emotional pain and depression with alcohol and became an alcoholic. At the time, I was a pastor in a large church. I disappointed and hurt a lot of people with my drunkenness. Most of them responded by pulling away. I spent two years living in an inner-city rescue mission. During those two years, I had one visit from anyone in my church.

I do understand why few people showed up for me in those days. I was not an easy person to love.

After two years in the rescue mission, I reconnected with my friend Gail. We were both divorced. Our friendship blossomed into something more, and I moved to Miami where she lived. Nine months later, we got married.

Unfortunately, my sobriety was still not solid. What was different, though, is that there was a small handful of people who refused to gave up on me.

As I meditated the last few days on what it means to love one another as Jesus loved us, I’ve been thinking about a time when one of those people loved me by showing up when I was at my worst.

Here is an excerpt from my memoir, Grace in the Morning.

“My pattern was that two or three times a year, I would relapse. I still went to daily AA meetings. I would not drink for months. Once, I went three days shy of a year without a drink. But then the emotional pain I’d carried my whole life would flare like a recurring fever; I would feel choaked by grief and sorrow, and cravings for an alcoholic escape would overwhelm me. And I would drink for a few days or even weeks, always drinking until I was drunk. One of those episodes was especially bad.

“Gail was at work, at her children’s ministry director job. I was a real estate agent working from home, stuffing envelopes for a mailing to a neighborhood where I was prospecting for new clients. That day, the cravings were relentless. In the afternoon, I drove a mile to a Winn Dixie and bought a bottle of wine. I took it home, sat in my home office, and gulped it down. When I had finished off that bottle, I was drunk and blacked out, but I had not passed out.

“Once that bottle was empty, I must have gone back to the Winn Dixie, driving drunk, and bought another bottle of wine. I have bits of memory of what happened next. I remember leaving the shopping center parking lot and heading home. I remember getting to our neighborhood and turning onto what I thought was our street, then realizing that it wasn’t our street. I was lost. I was only two blocks from our house, but I didn’t know where I was. Befuddled, I turned into a cul-de-sac and stopped the car to get my bearings and figure out the way back to the house. That’s all I remember. I must have passed out with the car still running.

“The next thing I knew, I was in a noisy and bright room. I didn’t know where I was. I was frightened. I got up and ran out of what turned out to be the emergency room of Jackson South Medical Center. I ran through a side door and got tangled in bushes. Two orderlies came after me and roughly brought me back inside. I was put into a bed in a small room, and the door was shut. Then, I was back into blackness.

“The next time I came into awareness, Gail was there. And so was our friend Dominique. I saw them talking softly in the corner of the room, and I spoke to them. They realized that I was out of the blackout. Dominique came and stood beside the bed.

“I’d known Dominique for nearly twenty years. During my first stint in Miami, when I was the director of student ministries at Christ the King Church, she was one of our volunteer leaders. More than just one of our volunteers, she had been a friend. She and Gail had also been close friends for years. I braced myself, expecting to see disgust and disappointment in her eyes. That’s what I’d seen before from friends who had found me in that condition. But that is not what I saw. There was an unmistakable look of love and concern on her face.

“How are you, friend?” she asked.

“I don’t remember our conversation, but I do remember the impact of her presence, of her expression of love and concern rather than disgust. The image I had of myself as a worthless loser and failure wavered just a bit.”

That was one of the last times I got drunk. Several weeks later, in August 2014, God lifted the obsession to drink from me. I’ve not had a drink in almost ten years and rarely even think about it.

One of the most powerful tools God used to repair the brokenness in my heart and remove the compulsion to drink was the love and acceptance I experienced from Dominique, a few others—my friend Jary, my pastor Kent, and most of all, from my wife Gail.

They refused to give up on me. They kept showing up, bringing with them the aroma of Jesus. And that made all the difference. Because Jesus left heaven and showed up for us when we needed him, we ought to love one another by showing up for those in need. Friends show up.