the bare messessities

So I just spent the morning sitting in a coffee shop thinking about relationships.

That may sound odd or highly existential, but I’m someone who finds herself constantly in talks with others about their relational joys and woes. I’m a counselor, not professionally anymore but the role continues to follow me. Besides, most of us— whether we realize it or not— spend at least [insert large number here] percent of our brainpower everyday analyzing our community, or daydreaming about the community we hope to be in someday, or reminiscing about the community in which we once lived.

So, in an effort to embrace my niche, I’ve been trying to write this blog on us humans relating to God and one another (because isn’t that the crux of all life?) but honestly I struggle feeling unqualified to give any thoughts on it since my own heart can’t stop/won’t stop its own continued cycle of ache and lesson-learning in relation to others.

I have the credentials. I have years racked up in ministry. However, it feels like the umpteen tears I’ve shed at God’s feet (often unwillingly) trying to understand how to sail my way through imperfect friendships has most instructed me in this mishmash of alienation and intimacy than anything else.

Am I the only one God works in like this?

And yet,

we would not understand the unfiltered, inextinguishable breadth of God’s power, grace, and love if the penners of The Word had sat in luxury homes with every bill paid, their surrounding world admiring them whilst all their dreams came true. Instead, they were disgustingly deficient people (outside of God’s grace that is) that were shipwrecked, imprisoned, stoned, and often disillusioned and deserted by the people they loved as they looked toward the promise of a heavenly community they could only catch glimpses of here on earth.

That’s me.

I have yet to be literally shipwrecked or stoned ( I’ve still got time), but I have felt the burn of the desert—or rather deserted-ness— whilst circling around a divine lesson I can’t seem to learn. I know the loneliness of sitting in a whale, wallowing in the stench of my stubbornness, self-pity and hurt. And more than a few times I’ve felt the pain of being shackled and imprisoned by my own nearsightedness, unable to see people through God’s grace and love; my chest constricted by fear of further hurt, my words held hostage in my chest by bitterness.

Funny thing though, as the morning passed by me in the coffee shop with me lost in the sauce of my own thoughts ,one of the shop’s baristas came and sat with me. Because I know her (she’s a close friend of my daughter who also works here so that puts her in position of an honorary daughter) I brought her right into where I was in my thoughts. Straight to the point.

“How’re you doing, y’know . . . spiritually and emotionally?”

She word vomited, reminding me what I didn’t need reminding of: I’m not the only one lost in the sauce.

This beautiful, smart twenty-somethings woman is in the throes of trying to figure out how to not live lonesomely by 1.) being a good friend and, 2.) even more difficult, admitting her desire to be loved in return. She explained to me how she knows God has “called us into community” (what an epic phrase that has lost its weight) but almost cannot help but hide behind a walled ruse of busyness in order to protect herself from being hurt.

What is it about being in a growing, intimate friendship that scares the sheesh out of all of us?

We are all aware of the longing God has placed in our hearts for something real with other people. We overdose on movies, tv and books about it. We sing songs about it. We Pinterest the kind of life that would be just the right setting for it.

And all this is well; for real relationships are necessary.

But they are also messy.

As my barista friend so rightly coined, they are messessary.

My hopes in threading out thoughts on this blog is to add to our lives a small, additional avenue of discovery in this realm, being even more intentional about learning what it means to live together under God’s roof being open with one another. Openly broken, openly loving, and openly free; without a backdoor open for a quick escape. To some, this sounds easy. To others, terrifying.

I guarantee you this: it is a messessity.