Though there have already been some interesting, slightly disturbing at times and most definitely disgusting stories attained during the race, this isn’t about those. This is about a brief thought I had during one of our daily bus rides here on our way to and from St. Nicholas’ Home for the Blind (where we’ve been serving this month). While we were making our way back home for the day I was thinking about what a “real friend” is like and specifically what it looks like for a real friend to help us get all the crap out of our lives.
An analogy came to mind with it, and honestly I don’t know why it came to mind this way, but I thought about poop… or I suppose just smelly things in general. Here’s the gist of it: sometimes a friend will “call us out in love” for the crappy things going on in our lives, but in a way that kind of just says, “hey I smell some seriously stinky stuff up in your business and its bothering my nostrils, so you should get rid of that smell”. And then there’s the friend that smells the same stuff and says “hey, I smell what you got goin on and that’s gonna become really problematic for you if you keep it around, so let’s find it and clean it up”
The first friend seems like they are confronting you for issues and desiring change in your life, because in some way they are, but in the end its basically selfish. They hate the smell you’re giving off and they just want it gone. The second still cares about the smell, but they care more about you and are willing to get even closer to that smell in order to help actually remove the big pile of crap causing it.
On the race we do this thing called feedback with each other. It’s brilliant and completely annoying at times. Ha the “annoying” part comes because we do it on the daily, with “no exceptions”. It truly is so good though and is one of the main reasons our team is spiritually and emotionally unified. During feedback we do just that, give each other feedback about the day. We tell each other things that we saw through out the day that were encouraging and we tell each other about things we saw that weren’t. More than that, we call each other up into the greatness that Christ calls us to live in. Feedback is essentially a time when we talk about everything and put it all out on the table. We don’t keep secrets and we don’t dwell in stuff, because that just turns into piles of crap, but when that does happen (because at the end of it all, we’re individuals who can decide not to talk about things if we really don’t want to) and it eventually comes out, we deal with it together.
Even in the midst of that, however, I can see myself and my teammates be more like the first friend, who getting a whiff of whatever, brings it up, but only so that you can cover it up. I can see us at times with in the talk of feedback, just want to talk and to tell someone that we smell what they got goin on, but then never be willing to actually dive in and help clean up the mess.
All of this really gets down to a selfless kind of care and love that I believe “real friends” offer. They care about change for your sake and not theirs, so they are willing to get more messy, potentially even hurt, and dig deeper than what’s just obviously apparent in order to see you move into more freedom, life, and love.
A couple days ago our team watched “The Kings Speech” and in retrospect I think in some ways it was the catalyst for a lot of this thought. If you haven’t seen it, you should.
