A Mutual Friend

Arriving at the park, I found myself eager to meet a person I had only heard about. A friend of a friend would be there and I had heard so many wonderful things about her!

Have you ever met someone through a mutual friend? Did you wrestle with knowing so much about a stranger but not actually knowing them for yourself?

Those were the questions that crossed my mind as I met this new person with whom I already had a second-hand familiarity. I suddenly wondered what they knew about me? We were tethered together by a person we both loved! But, I reflected on what I had learned about the person I was meeting and wondered what they had already learned about me?

Was it my strengths or my faults they already knew? Had they heard that I like to sing? Or did they know about the scars of trauma that had marked my life in a season that our mutual friend was so near to me?

The picnic went well. We laughed a lot, maybe cried a little. It was an overall lovely time and I walked away with a new friend.

It does not always go that way. Sometimes we accompany a friend to meet someone new-to-us to help bolster our friend’s confidence: to be their wingman. Sometimes we meet a friend-of-a-friend out and about, maybe staring in the line at a coffee shop because you know that person two spaces ahead of you in line is so-and-so. We wonder if we should say hi or just let the moment slip away.

It can be a little intimidating to meet someone through a mutual friend. A few nights ago, I realized that is how just about everyone I know has met Jesus.

For divinely providential reasons, the knowledge of God has been passed from person to person. While the knowledge of God has a general revelation all around us on this beautiful planet (I mean, I cannot look at a mountain range at sunset without thinking that there was purpose in their construction), there is the revelation of who God is that comes from person after person sharing what they have known. We pass Bibles down in families or out on streets because God seems to delight in His children meeting Him in this way.

There seems, most often, to be an introduction involved in meeting Jesus for the first time.

Jesus pointed out that people would come to believe in Him through the interpersonal sharing of His message. He prayed for those who would believe the message His believers would share (John 17:20-23). That prayer was for all of us who have come to believe, down through the ages, the message of the Savior.

And it was shared through people: flawed, imperfect people saved by grace alone through faith.

But not everyone has shared this message the same way. Some have twisted it to use for their own purposes. Some have watered down the truth of this message to try and make the most satisfying water of life more tasteful, in some way. Some have flat-out lied.

I am not sure if you have ever met someone through a mutual friend and found them to be completely unlike anything your friend told you. While that has happened to me a few times, I have also been the person that was surprisingly unlike what someone was expecting me to be.

It occurred to me this week that there are many people who, when introduced to God, found Him to be something completely other than what they had heard about.

I clearly remember leaving Bible study one day on campus in university to find a man with signs and a megaphone yelling some of the most hateful stuff I had ever heard. He condemned our athletic shorts as we walked by while I saw some of my brothers in Christ lingering on edges of the crowd asking people what they thought about this message. They did their best to undo the damage done by words spoken harshly from a literal pedestal through face-to-face conversation in gentleness. I knew that Bible he was waving around better than ever before and I knew that what this person was saying was unlike much of what Jesus’ message really says.

That was not the case for everyone in that crowd. I felt that, if every time that megaphone preacher shared the message of Christ on campus was like a dinner invitation to meet his friend, no one in that crowd wanted to dine with his Jesus.

I had heard condemnation and shame interwoven with the Gospel of Jesus in my early years. But, when I opened the Word and studied with believers who truly displayed the fruits of God’s Spirit in them, I found that Jesus came to save an already condemned people and to give life abundant, not to condemn them (John 3:16-18). He came to make a way out of darkness into the light! I found that holiness tasted sweeter than anything else in this world simply because it came from the One who created me, who knew what was best for me, and who paid a debt I could never pay on my own.

Oh, it is so hard to unlearn false things we have learned about others! It is difficult to make a new friend and block out what someone told you about them months before. It is uncomfortable to make a second date with a person you think you may have completely misunderstood on the first date. And it is gut wrenching to approach the Father you came to hate (or maybe vehemently believed was not even real) when you start to wonder if He is unlike anything you thought you knew about Him.

It is God’s response to being misunderstood that strikes me most. When Nicodemus came to Jesus, slinking and covered by the darkness of night, Jesus received him with open ears and gentle truth (John 3:1). Nicodemus did not want anyone to know he was questioning the common misconceptions and downright slander against Jesus. He snuck to the Savior and the Savior seemed to pull up a chair for him!

When I have been misunderstood or slighted by someone who does not really know me, I have a hard time pursuing a relationship with them. But Jesus knew exactly what was in Nicodemus’ heart and mind. He knows the truth about every person and extends mercy beyond my comprehension. Jesus knows the truth about how we got to our wrong beliefs about Him and is ready to lead us to know Him rightly.

I am challenged in the season to protect and steward better than ever before the words I share about Jesus. May I make introductions to the Savior that are truthful and inviting. May I be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks (1 Peter 3:15) and may I live a life that makes others want to ask me where my hope comes from!

My prayer is that you - whoever you are - would know Jesus for who He really is.

In the Love of Christ,

Hannah