As Don mentioned two weeks ago, a few of us on staff are taking the opportunity to share our favorite Proverbs with you. I appreciated Don’s blog post as it was a great reminder of the power that our words can have. Sometimes I say too much and entirely the wrong thing and other times I don’t say enough of the right thing. I’m incredibly thankful we have a God who is full of grace and forgiveness when our word choice fails us!
Now it’s my turn to share two of my favorite verses which both speak of the value and importance of friendship.
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” Proverbs 27:17
“One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” Proverbs 18:24
With each year that passes I’m realizing more and more that life isn’t exactly as I imagined it would be. I remember as a young girl playing “house” with the girls in my neighborhood, each taking on a different role as we reenacted what we thought life was all about. The mom made delicious pretend meals that everyone loved and had no complaints about, dad went off to work but loved what he did and came home excited and energized, and the children all miraculously got along and were respectful and obedient. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?
I don’t remember our “house” scripts including aging and death, cancer and illness (physical and mental), job lay-offs and extremely tight budgets, bullying in schools, infertility and miscarriages, disabilities, strained marriages and divorce, abuse, terrorism and war … the list goes on. What a debbie downer, right? I just had no idea what a world of sin could look like until I entered college and was met with the reality of the real world. I quickly learned that life was hard, that life is hard. That is truth.
Many of us can think back to a time in our lives when we were down in the trenches… a time when life was dark and felt completely hopeless… a time when we didn’t know if we’d make it through to the other side. If we we’re honest with ourselves, deep within our hearts we questioned whether God was really good and how He could sit back and watch His beloved be engulfed in such pain and sorrow. Maybe you find yourself in that place now or maybe you’ve watched a loved one go through that process. I’ve seen that darkness myself and I’ve wrestled with those very questions.
You know what God used to get me through that darkness in my life? A group of broken but beautiful women... a group of women who were “closer than a brother” and reliable …a group of women who sharpened me… a group of women who said “I know you don’t believe that God is good right now but I’ll believe it for you… a group of women who told me every day (sometimes several times a day) how they saw God using me and working in me when my eyes were blind… a group of women who knew they couldn’t fix me (as much as they may have wanted to) so they got down on their knees and stayed down on their knees praying desperately and eagerly to the One who could fix me and lift the darkness and replace it with light. And for those women I am forever grateful!
Yes, life is hard. But in the midst of that hardship God gives us one another so we don’t have to do it alone. Man am I so thankful for that gift that I so often take for granted! My prayer is that Grace Community Church would be a congregation daily on our knees for each other. That God would be sharpening us together. That our church family would stick close to one another through the good, the bad, and especially in the ugly!
In Him,
Stacey