Reminiscing on an old Friend
-by Robert Fullarton
copyright 2016
Today I was just reminiscing of days gone by, from another chapter in my life. I remember a friend of mine, a man who encouraged me through a transitional period, who shared his story with me, who helped me come to terms with my human weaknesses and sowed seeds of faith in my heart that were essential to my rediscovery of Christianity. We both worked together, we took time on our breaks to share stories and to laugh, to banter and we even prayed together when we were not working. There were many people at this particular period in my life (and I certainly know them all in my heart and mind and credit them honourably) who were of immense benefit to my rediscovery of my lapsed faith, they were people who gave me time in moments of great fear and pain, who advised me when I most needed advice and befriended me, when I was an outsider looking inside.
I want to talk specifically about one man (as an example) who changed me, who changed himself internally, who was a prime example of what God can do the human life when it surrenders its proud shell or resistance and agrees to change (the surrender of the heart is the release of the “iron weights” that bind one’s soul to a stubborn pride, the moment after a heart filled submission we are joyfully immersed in a moment that allows God into our life).
When I first entered the workplace, I was quite confused about my faith and about my identity. I had filled my life with wishy-washy new age religion, with a mix of many philosophies, I would read just about any book to increase my knowledge, I had dwindled in my spiritual faith and I had neglected the moral duties that went with it. I believe that I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, that my attitude was completely wrong and that I had at times behaved rather badly. I was angry with God after I had suffered a severe nervous breakdown. I had gone back and forth to doctors; I had tried every type of therapy, relaxation and medication, (often all at once) and had not discovered the “elixir of life” that would restore my nervous system to its natural setting. I had foolishly thought that God was uncaring or that he was not the God that I had thought him to be, as he let these catastrophes happen to me “apparently without caring or interceding.” But I look back now and I can see with a wide angled lens on this picture that God is not to be confined to the “box of our limitations” and he is more powerful than we can imagine, Christ is greater than we can imagine. The limitations of man’s faith, determination and imagination can be a terrible shortfall or roadblock to the power and potential that he can untap within our lives.
God sent people into my life, they extracted my confessions, they brought out the pain, the fear and the joy in me, the moments were intense, passionate, alive and the definition of the reality that God powers behind the facade of the world. Oh my I can tell you that each man’s work will be tested in the fire, as the saying goes, and indeed each man’s heart will be put to the test over the rough and tumble Christian race to the end. Ours is the standard of God’s love, God’s nature that we hold high for all to see and we seek continual change. The mystery and majesty behind the situation is that we are transformed from within like sculptures from a God that is shaping our internal lives into a perfection akin to his son, through pain, through rejection, through high’s and emotional lows we go, but we are always stronger, wiser, deeper individuals and with a character that has been stamped with the divine seal.
Yes, life was not what we thought it was, it is a hard life, a life of tests, for enduring cruel realities and it is much more brutal than perhaps our beginning, and like the Israelites that wandered through the desert we too can become disillusioned and state that the promised land is beyond our hopes of being fulfilled, we can lose faith, courage and goodness and even be tempted back to the weaknesses and compromises of the old life we lived before our covenant with God was sealed. But why would we want to go back to an utterly inferior existence that looks shallow and meaningless in the face of the life that offers eternity, that is sealed in love, in personal union with the God the world does not know and still detests.
The man I am writing about shared his story with me, his is a story of transition, of change and transformation as an example of what God can do with each human being. Every human wants to be known by name and to be loved beyond imagination. I remember his conversion (I know now that every Christian must be born again, must repent, confess and come to know Jesus Christ, must change and be tenderised in both soul and heart, to become like Christ himself) he told me of his former battle with alcohol, minor drug problems, anger, relational problems and character flaws. When I was weak he held me up, when he was weak, I helped to hold him up, it was God who worked through us, the conversations would flow, the transformations continued within us both. I see in him today, a man who has been blessed, with a loving wife, the blessings of children, good friends, happily employed, a man who has witnessed and lifted up drug addicts, the sick, the homeless and the elderly. I am happy to call him my friend and my do I miss his company, in the twists and turns of this strange and tremendous struggle of life. With grace we live and endure through the countless knocks, blows, let-downs, put-downs and weaknesses that come against us on our ever harsh run to God.
Labels: Non-Fiction
