Day 31

Friday, April 4th

Don’t push your way to the front; don’t sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand. 

(Philippians 2:4 MSG)

It was 1984, the summer before my first year of high school, and I had just moved from Ft McMurray to Red Deer. I made a friend that summer who lived in my neighbourhood and we spent every day together. Grade 10 came and went and we were inseparable, we rode the bus together, ate lunch together, came home together, and hung out every weekend. She was one of the kindest people I have known, even to this day. Then in Grade 11, the “popular kids” came calling, asking me to eat lunch with them, to do things on the weekends and my friend wasn’t included in those invitations. I wish I could say I stuck by my friend, but I didn’t. I left her to eat her lunch alone as I moved up the social ladder. 

Tears still sting my eyes and I get a hollow feeling in my chest when I think of the way I treated her all those years ago. I wish I could say that was the only time I was uncaring to the people in my life, but it wasn’t. I was too busy trying to fill a hole inside myself to care about who I hurt in the process. 

We can get caught up in so many things, can’t we? Making the right friends, finding the right partner, getting the right job, reaching that goal, securing that promotion, even just going about our day to day. It is so easy to focus on what we want to accomplish and forget all about what God wants to accomplish through us. And with God, it’s always about people. 

If we stay close to Jesus, we will naturally look outward. If we stay connected to him, letting him fill us up instead of desperately trying to fill the empty place inside ourselves with other things, He will always bring someone into our proximity for us to love. In some small way toward a stranger, or in bigger ways towards the people closest to us.

I was married with a few children and living in BC before I faced what I’d done to my high school friend. I wrote her a letter asking for her forgiveness and she wrote back with the grace and kindness she’d always shown me. It was good to face up to what I had done, to tell her I was sorry and to tell God I was sorry, too. 

As you were reading this today, if you were reminded of someone you mistreated at some point in your life, perhaps there is a step God wants you to take, like sending a message of apology or something else. Pray for the clarity and the courage to take whatever step God wants you to take. Remember that you are forgiven by a God who loves you unconditionally. 

For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him;

(Psalm 103:11)