Jackie Robinson was the first black guy to play major league baseball. Breaking baseball's color barrier, he faced jeering crowds in every stadium. While playing one day in his home stadium in Brooklyn, he committed an error. The fans began to ridicule him. He stood at second base, humiliated, while the fans jeered. Then, shortstop Pee Wee Reese came over and stood next to him. He put his arm around Jackie Robinson and faced the crowd. The fans grew quiet. Robinson later said that arm around his shoulder saved his career.
I love that story. As I have gotten older, I have become more and more thankful for the amazing friends God has given me in my life. More than once they have 'saved my career,' in the sense of picking me up when I am down and helping me take the next step forward knowing someone cared and was there for me and with me. When I was younger, I had a group of friends that I was pretty close to and played sports with and went to church with many of them. As we grew into Jr High and beyond, we grew apart somewhat, at least in part due to my commitment to Christ and church and things like that. God almost immediately replaced those friends with an even better group of friends...friends who were already there but who I became best friends with. God used that group of friends to start a Christian organization that met EVERY morning before school on our high school campus and that became a leadership group within our pretty large church youth group. Among that group of friends is a lifelong close friend who was the best man at my wedding and who is still a close friend to this day and another who was also in my wedding.
When I got into college, God drew me to involvement with the BSU (now called BCM) on my campus, after a fairly miserable first semester. I got involved there the second semester, made tons of new friends and some really good friends through that, and God used that group of friends to be leaders in our college ministry, both at the BSU and some of them at our church as the college ministry there grew as well. One of those was in my wedding and is still one of my closest friends to this day as well and several others are still pretty good friends, some of them becoming roommates and more. Another, who became one of my best friends later in the college experience, almost single-handedly helped me through one of the darkest toughest times I had been through to that point. When I saw this friend recently it was an awesome reconnection and I'm super thankful for her to this day.
When I left college, I left home really for the first time and moved 3 hours away to a place I knew almost nobody. Almost immediately I connected with one of the older students in the ministry I was working in...he would later become a roommate, was also in my wedding, and we are still pretty close to this day as well. Also among those friends was my best friend...my wife...who started out as merely as a good friend, and God took that and made it into much more for so long. Several other people in that ministry experience God used to get me through that first year and to show me that I could do what I felt He was calling me to do.
Fast forward to my current job and current life. I was a 23 year old raw rookie not long out of college when God brought me to a smallish rural Southern Baptist church that looking back on it seemed so not how I was for so many reasons. From day one, however, they loved and accepted and supported me, and for 12 years befriended me. Ministry life is so so different than most people's lives at this age and stage. Every time I have needed it, however, God has brought the encouragement and friendship from both within (adult, student, former student) and outside of our church that I have needed to keep plugging away. Without that support and friendship, I'm not sure I could have made it this long, through the ups and downs of ministry life. In the past few years, God has given me two extremely good friends in two other youth pastors in the area who I can hang out with, talk to, spend time with, and relate to. They have at times been life-savers. SEVERAL people within this church have become the type of close friends I have needed at certain times and some are to this day among my very best friends after my wife. Without them, at times, doing this job would be next to impossible. In fact, this very day, God used three of them to be a listening ear at a time I needed, a time of frustration and discouragement, and their willingness, along with my wife's, to simply be there to talk to/listen to me has carried me through this day in some ways.
I owe an extreme debt of gratitude to all of these people in so many ways and on so many levels. They wouldn't want to be named or singled out. They wouldn't want the accolades. They would tell you they are frail, fragile, imperfect human beings just doing what they know best. And honestly, that is why I hold them dear. In Ecclesiastes 4, and several times in Proverbs, it makes it so clear the value of true, genuine, real relationship and friendship and the incredible thing it is to find the friend who is more like family. The older I get, the more I know that, and the more I need and value that. Maybe I'm just more needy than I used to be. But more than anything I realize there is no price tag on the value and treasure of a good friend, of and at any age and stage of life, and I'm so thankful to God for each of them, past and present that God has used and continues to use in my life and my ministry. You are my heroes and a big part of who I am and why I am who I am. And for that, thanks never seems like a big enough word.
Soundtrack for a Note: U2 All That You Can't Leave Behind album; She and Him Volume One album
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