For the last year or so, I have watched Emily*. After a short time, a pattern revealed itself:

• Her husband beats her up.
• Her husband leaves home.
• She announces that this time it is over – she is leaving him for good.
• He comes back.
• They are together again, and she tells me this time he has changed.

I have watched this happen at least five times. At least five times, I have held her gently as she cries, so as not to hurt her bruises. Five times I have told her I would put her on a bus to anywhere in the country or get her to a safe house, where her husband could never find her. Five times she has told me she would think about it and let me know. Five times she has told me this time, it was different and five times, she took him back.

When I saw her a few days ago, she told me he was much better this time. “I think he has really changed this time”, she says, just like she said the four times before that.

I have no idea what to do for her, other than to be there and to continue to pray for her (and to ask you to pray for her). She is so desperate to be loved, she will take what passes for it at the cost of broken ribs and black eyes. One of my biggest fears right now is that he is going to kill her. When she is most lucid, she admits this is possible as well. Yet she takes him back.

I used to think my being out here was about fixing things. Sometimes it is. But most of the time, it is just being someone who will still love you when you make a fool of yourself for the fifth time.

*Names changed for privacy

My friend Danny* called last Monday morning and said he was passing blood. He told me he had thrown up blood yesterday. I told him to catch the bus and I would meet him at the Emergency Room at the hospital.

Thirty minutes later, I show up – no Danny. Undaunted (Danny is always running late), I pull out my laptop and fire it up, hoping to get a bit of writing done while I wait. Three hours and two cups of hospital coffee later… No Danny.

Worried, I call some people who know him to see if they know where he is, but they have not seen him. We call the other hospitals, but he is not there either. We call the free clinic and we call the shelter he had called me from that morning, but no Danny. That night, I go to the soup kitchen and the shelter, but no sign of him in either place.

At some point, you realize you have done all you can, and I was at that point. He was either fine or he was passed out somewhere from loss of blood, but either way, there was nothing I could do about it. So, I went home. And worried.

The next day I heard a third-hand story about his being OK and some alleged confusion at the hospital…all of which sounded very fishy.  I was mad at being stood up and he was embarrassed at standing me up, so we avoided running into each other the rest of the week.

Yesterday morning, I saw Danny at our Sunday morning breakfast we do in the park. He tried to avoid me and do his ‘stupid shuffle’ (he acts stupid as a defense mechanism when you corner him) but we have been friends too long for it to work on me.

I let him have it. Both barrels. I told him that he really ticked me off by standing me up. That I had been worried sick about him. That he caused me to waste a whole day worrying about his stupid self and… you get the idea.

And he took it, and said he did not understand why I had been worried.  I explained to him that, while I sometimes wish I did not, I love him and was worried about him, and you do not treat people who love you the way he treated me. He apologized, and we hugged, and we are OK. For now. Until next time.

Danny has a hard time understanding that I could love him for no reason other than I love him. In his world, relationships grow out of mutual need: I watch your back, you watch mine. That I would be his friend and expect nothing but his friendship back is a concept so foreign to him, he has no words for it.

Sadly, many of my Christian friends are in the same place Danny is. They want to know what my agenda is, what the results are, what change is occurring in these people’s lives, who is getting “saved”, etc. They just do not get it. I don’t love him so he will change. I love him because he is worth it.

For 52 years, Danny has been the victim of brokenness & abuse, hatred because of his blackness, received practically zero education, been in and out of the county jail and struggled with drug abuse. There is no quick fix here, and some days I wonder if there is any fix at all. I pray that love is powerful enough to overcome all of that and to give him some sort of future.  But even if  loving him doesn’t make a difference, loving him matters. And even if he doesn’t change, he is no longer alone. And neither am I.

*Names are changed to protect my friend’s privacy.

All my life, I have been warned about the ‘wrong crowd’. We are told the way the world works is that one bad apple will ruin the whole barrel, that the bad kids will influence the good kids, that bad is more influential than good. It even sounds right.

The big thing for me, though, is that Jesus did not seem to believe it. » Read the rest of this entry «

You see, we operate from this crazy premise we see in the teachings of Jesus that love, once given, spreads and grows (sorta like yeast, or a mustard seed…) and takes hold and, in small ways and in incremental bits, works to change us, then each other, and then, the world, working towards truly making it on earth as it is in heaven.

That is my favorite line from May’s newsletter, which many have said is their favorite of mine. If you have not subscribed, now would be a great time to do so. I will get the online archive of May’s newsletter up next Monday.

There is no point in getting into an argument about this notion of loving. It is what Christianity is all about — take it or leave it. Christianity is not about ritual and moral living except insofar as these two express the love that causes both of them. We must at least pray for the grace to become love. - Brennan Manning, A Glimpse of Jesus