I saw an old friend recently, someone who played a big part in encouraging me to consider Christianity when I was younger. I don’t know every detail of her life, but from what I do know, this is what I perceive…
She was full of belief, commitment and conviction throughout school and university, when she started work in the city she had many Christian friends and belonged to a big church with a strong Bible-teaching ministry. She was involved, she went to meetings, she read her Bible, she prayed.
Then she met a young man, they hit it off, they started dating. He wasn’t a believer but she hoped, she prayed, she invited. Gradually he started going along to church with her, he did a course and at some point he professed faith in Jesus. They got engaged, they had a Christian wedding, they settled in a suburb and joined a good local church, they had children.
Once again, she was involved: she attended church on Sundays, the children went to Sunday School, she was at the prayer meeting, she helped out at church events. Her husband came on Sundays, if he wasn’t away with work; and if they couldn’t find a babysitter, he would stay at home to look after the children so that she could go to the prayer meeting or housegroup.
Then they moved away to an area where she didn’t know many people, and where the church situation was a little more ‘complicated’. They started going to the church, but her husband was often travelling, or recovering from a business trip; then the distractions of sport, homework, party invitations and so on started to draw the children away, so Sundays became tricky. It was hard for her to turn up on her own when everyone knew she had a husband and children, so she stopped going so often.
She was in a Bible-study group, but they were increasingly spending time reading "helpful books" and discussing parenting or marriage and trying to help each other with the issues of family life, than studying God’s word and it began to seem less relevant and meaningful to her everyday situation.
Questions started to pile up, that she couldn’t answer – and she had no one really to discuss them with. What about other religions? Why does God allow suffering? She’d known how to answer those questions in the past, but those answers just didn’t seem to ring true any more, and she started to wonder if she’d ever really believed the answers she’d given to others.
They moved again; this time to an area with a great church where she already knew a couple of people. She didn’t go along on Sundays, and the rest of the family certainly weren’t interested, but she managed to join a women’s Bible study group. She hoped to make friends in the new area, but everyone was so busy already, they didn’t really seem to have ‘space’ for new people. She was surprised that no-one in the Bible study group seemed to have picked up that she didn’t really believe anymore – clearly giving the ‘right’ answers was enough – and so gradually she stopped going to that too.
In Galatians 6:10, Paul instructs the Galatians, "Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers."
Taken alone, we might assume he’s talking about practical provision for those in our church families; but Paul starts this section by addressing how to deal with those caught in sin and goes on to remind us to "carry each other’s burdens". He talks about reaping the harvest of eternal life. The greatest good we can do for our friends is to help them to keep the faith, to keep on trusting in Jesus. In the parable of the sower (Luke 8) Jesus doesn’t set a time limit for those who fall away in the time of testing or for those who are choked by life’s worries, riches and pleasures and we should never stop looking out for each other.
So, please, heed the warnings from my experience. Heed them for yourselves and for those you know and love: challenge your friends who are dating non-Christians, call those friends from church who you haven’t seen for a while, protect Sundays from the demands of sport and social activities, keep reading your Bible, consider where you could go to church when you think about moving house, make sure your Bible-study group studies the Bible, look out for those who are new to your area and make time for them, listen carefully to what others in your small group say, be bold in asking your friends how their spiritual life is going, keep asking the difficult questions, even of those who seem (or have seemed in the past) so sure and certain in their faith. I wish I’d done more of these last two for my friend, I’m challenged to do them more with other friends now.
I’d like to say that there’s a happy ending to this story, and I’m certainly praying that there will be. It’s never too late, but it’s certainly going to be harder now that she’s saying she doesn’t believe. But, our God is faithful and he promises never to let go of his children, and I am praying that my friend will turn back to him.
