Friendship and ICTC

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.

John 15:12-14


Something I am beginning to understand more and more is just how active the act of friendship is. It's not something that you just let happen and accept for granted like the sun rising in the morning. At least, real friendship isn't. It's a process that you keep up on a daily basis. An act of will. You need to show how much you love your friends or your friendship will just wither and rot away.

I am so blessed by friends who really let me know what our friendship means. I'm even more blessed by those friends who keep me in check and let me know when I'm not acting like a friend. THat is so important. What good is a friendship, afterall, if your friend is content to let you be just who you are, forever stagnant, forever unchanged? The point of friends is to love you for who you are now, of course. But they also must love you for who you can be and forever be pushing you to grow towards that. Friends grow together. And that is so powerful.

It follws then that friendship with Jesus must be proactive. The difference between friendship with Jesus and friendship with everybody else is that Jesus already showed us that his love was so great he would lay down his life for us. We have no greater love, no greater friendship than Jesus. His friendship with us, the fact that he deeply, deeply loves us even to death, is never in question.

But friendship is a two-way relationship. We have to reciprocate. We have to lay down our lives for Jesus, because we are his friend. How do we do this? By loving each other as he loved us, by putting ourselves on the line for our friends.

Next year I will be in Chicago, volunteer teaching in a school on the southside with a program called Inner-City Teaching Corps. (See: www.ictc-chicago.org) A lot of people have asked me, why? Why do you want to do this? This, in part, explains it. All I have that I can give to Jesus is my life, and I will do that with my whole heart.