Just stick around

I have gone to church all my life, and have heard pastors, preachers, leaders - people in general - tell me the importance of "loving the lost." Love the sinner, hate the sin; love them even if you don't agree with them; love them to Jesus. Let's be honest, the cliches are endless. And yet, I've noticed that that same "love" is rarely extended from one believer to another, especially inside the walls of the church. Think about it? How often do we criticize people who leave the church because "they didn't leave the right way"? How often do we roll our eyes or avoid people because they might say something about the church we go to or our pastor or whatever, and we just don't want to "be around that"? It's very easy to criticize believers who don't live, act, pray, read, love, talk the way that we do. It's much easier to love the unbeliever than the believer who let us down.

That is, until tragedy strikes.

Once life gets hard and someone goes through something that we can't possibly imagine, it's so easy to pop back up with an "I'm so sorry. I can't imagine what you're going through, but I'm here."

This sentiment puzzles me. It puzzles me because it is just that: a sentiment. It's not that I don't believe that the sympathy is real and heartfelt. It's not that I don't believe the genuine desire to "be there." It's that I don't trust the sentiment. I don't trust the emotion to last longer than the moment they heard the news and sent the email or made the phone call.

Over the last month, I've learned a very important lesson about these kinds of relationships. That lesson is this: the relationships that matter are not the ones that form around a tragedy. It's easy to grieve with people; it's hard to live life with them. It's easy to shed a tear over an episode that is truly tragic; it's hard to be happy for someone when he/she has everything that you've begged God to give you. It's hard to smile say "Congratulations! I'm so happy for you!" and really mean it. It's even harder to say that truthfully when you know that your drive home will fill with tears the moment the door shuts and the engine roars. And yet, the friends who are real are the ones who stick with it, not just when the hard times come around and sympathy pulls at heart strings, but when life is wonderful and heaven couldn't seem any more real than it does in that moment.

Even in saying this, I know that there are exceptions to this rule. There are times when the best thing you can do is pull away for a time and let God work on healing you. I don't begrudge this need at all because I, myself have felt it more often than not over the last weeks. There are other times when the smile is fake and saying "Congratulations!" is about all you can muster. The emotion behind that "Congratulations!" may take a lot longer, but at least you get credit for trying, right?

The truth of the matter is this: no relationship is perfect and there's no way anyone can be a perfect friend/wife/husband/sister/brother/daughter/son all the time. But if there was any advice I could give to someone attempting to build relationships it would be this: be there. Be there when life is good. Be there when life sucks. If you haven't been there, apologize. Believe me: that apology will be enough. And then, start being there again. Be there even when you don't know what to say. Be there silently, if you have to. Be there when it costs everything to smile and when you truly couldn't be more happy for the person.

Just do your best to get there and stay there because, when the shit hits the fan (sorry, Mom), the ones who matter are the ones who are already there, not the ones who run to show up.