Being nice…

It was late on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon. The leadership seminar audience was full of pastors from Korea. The late John Wimber had been diligently moving through the written material giving it his best when he looked up with a kind of wry smile on his face and said, “We’re just a bunch of guys trying to keep our pants zipped up, our hands out of the till, and be nice most of the time.” These minimum daily requirements for leadership seemed to be something it was possible I could live up to.

Let’s face it though, it’s not easy being nice. I was on the phone with my cable company for about 40 minutes the other night trying to straighten out why I had a $400 bill. Not easy being nice. A client showed up to a hearing without the proper identification meaning I have to come back to court on her case, her response, “I didn’t know.” Not easy being nice. I drove from Moreno Valley to San Bernardino (about 20 miles) to pick up a part for my car, and opened the box to find it was the wrong part. The right part was not available. Not easy being nice.

Jesus said, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jn. 15:13 (NLT via Biblegateway.com). Lay down my life? How about just being nice? In the life of church, this is sometimes not so easy. Have you noticed that couples get divorced? Usually the husband or the wife gets “custody” of the church. In most cases, this means that the “missing” spouse loses all of those “church” friendships. Trust me, that’s not easy.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal discussed the trials of “break-ups” with friends. From the article: “It’s a myth that friendships last forever,” says Irene S. Levine, a psychologist, professor of psychiatry at New York University’s medical school and author of “Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend.” We are tied to our family by blood and our spouses by law, so we are often more attentive to those relationships. “Friendships are relationships of choice, so we tend to overlook them,” she says.

The church is the “body of Christ.” It’s really impossible to “break up” with your left foot, isn’t it? Yet, it isn’t really a body, is it? Friendships, the truest kind, where people care for you and love you in spite of your messy ways, and your weaknesses, those are hard to come by. They are hard to lose. Miles and years, changing jobs, and changing circumstances are allowed to separate us from those we have loved and cared for! Thank God he invented Facebook! Now I can renew old friendships (kind of) and make many new friends with people I don’t even know! At least I can have up to 5000 friends before my friends have to become fans!

In times past you could always find someone’s closest friends on one of the handles carrying their coffin from the funeral chapel to the hearse for the ride to the cemetery. I guess this is the kind of thing that “older” folks think about. Who’s going to be hanging on to my coffin handles? Love, friendship, being nice and laying down my life, this is all pretty deep stuff to be thinking about on an early Sunday morning!