Faith to Friendship – Made for Relationship
Christian Friendship is incredibly important to growing in our Catholic faith. We are made for relationship. But we are also made with free will. Let’s use our free will to CHOOSE to make our friendships the best that they can be, and let’s ask the Holy Spirit what our souls need to learn in the process.
“It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18).
This is the only time in the creation story that God uses the words “it is not good” to describe something he created. Why was it not good for man to be alone? Just because Adam would be lonely with nobody to talk to? Now, remember that Adam was created to be in relationship with God. Would he have been lonely in God’s presence?
No, the real reason for God declaring “it is not good for man to be alone” is that before he created Adam he had declared, “Let us make man in our image.” To be made in the image of God means to reflect the attributes of God. And God is not a solitary person. The essence of God is three divine Persons who live in a relationship of perfect love. In fact, as St. John tells us, God is love (1 John 2:8). So for Adam to be the image of God, he needed love to be part of his nature. Sure, he could love God. But for love to be part of his nature, Adam needed to love someone who shared his nature.
All of this theology enlightens us to one strategic fact about human happiness.
We were created to love.
If you want to be truly happy – truly fulfilled – then you need to fill your life with love. Love of God has to come first. He is the author of love, after all. Love within your vocation comes second. Your vocation is your school of love, where you learn to truly give yourself as a gift to others and to love as Jesus loves. But our mission to love doesn’t stop there. We are called to a universal and constant love for each and every person. God commanded us to love our neighbor, then Jesus taught us that we are to be neighbor to everyone. Our hearts will find joy in nothing less than a completion of our mission to love. And the closer we get to fulfilling that mission of constant, universal love the more fulfilled we will be.
And that is why Christian friendship is so important. Friendship teaches us how to take the lessons we learn in our vocation and apply them to the greater world outside of our vocation. If the family is the “school of love,” as Saint Pope John Paul II calls it, we might call friendship our “school of community.” Like all relationships, we tend to think of friendship as one of life’s little perks – something that we just “fall into.” But like all relationships in reality, friendship is not just something that happens to us. If we are to truly nurture our friendships and experience them as a school of community, we have to be conscious and deliberate about the way we cultivate them.
Would you like to learn how to take your relationships to the next level? “Rebuilding Your Inner Abbey” is an online program that guides you to rebuild that place in your heart where you can truly focus on what is most important – your relationship with Jesus and your relationships with other people. One of the rooms of your inner abbey is the Cafeteria, where even the most cloistered of religious orders gather to enjoy nourishment and fellowship. The Cafeteria of your inner abbey represents the place in your heart where you take conscious, deliberate hold of your relationships so that you can truly nurture them. But before you can rebuild the Cafeteria, you first need to find the key that opens this long neglected room! That’s what the “Keys to Spiritual Growth” program is all about. It covers the foundational strategies that you can start implementing today to start making improvements in your relationships with God and with other people. If you’re serious about building your relationships with Jesus, with your family, with your friends – and I know you are because you are still reading this – then click here to register for a FREE online course that introduces you to the Keys to Spiritual Growth. You’ll learn about all of the important areas of spirituality that we need to nurture in order to truly live as God created us. Click here now and begin the process of rebuilding your inner abbey!