Entanglement

Back to the article “Making Friends for Life.” Comment, Sept. 2006, 34-39:

 

“I think we ought to think about getting tangled up.”

“The streamlined life is not worth living.  Community and friendship are things to get tangled up in.  They aren’t easy or efficient.  But they give meaning to our lives.  What does a tangled life look like?  It has all the components of connecting belief and behavior that I described at the beginning.  It starts by understanding the relationship of loving to knowing.  We get close to both ideas and others.  The thorns of intimacy bring to light our brokenness and we learn to be humble.  But we come to embrace our callings.”

This too links back to a previous thought, one given me from The Shack, written by William P. Young,  when the character representing the Holy Spirit gardens in the back yard with Mack.  The character shares that the fractal, the messy tangles of the garden are not what needs to be cleaned up, but what is beautiful to God.  The mess, the tangles, the wild jungle is the beautiful aim.  Perhaps the goal of God’s sanctifying us is not a perfectly manicured, golf course-like lawn but a wild jungle, a tangle of flowers and leaves and fuzzy stumps.   If God is not aiming for me to look like a tight, measured, manicured individual, why am I?  

“For me college was marked by the experience of dissolving relationships, by family’s scattering about the globe, and by home-packing-up and relocating hundreds of miles away.  I have rarely returned to a place.  Everything seems different where I used to belong.  I am a stranger.  But that reality is not just in the past, it is with me in the present. And this tangled life makes me remember that a heart can hurt.  But it has also given me courage to take risks, to know that the way of real redemption means taking off an old self, and being made anew.  The solution cannot be to turn life into an abstraction.  As we tell our stories in community, we see our entanglement, and our vulnerabilities become connections with who we are, together.”

   back to the article:

“But college was also a time of deep and intimate conversations that formed friendships that will last a lifetime.  Having risked entanglement, I have found others that allow me to know them and I found a place where I could be known.  I continue to discuss the big ideas with friends, and often just rambling about the everydayness of life.  Friendship shows us that it is possible to know and be known, to love and be loved.  As friends share in your joys, you can share in theirs…You almost never get back what you invest in a friendship but what is gained is different, mysterious, and always greater than you could have thought. 

 

Friendship means rejecting being streamlined.”

 

From Veltman, Greg.  “Making Friends for Life.” Comment, Sept. 2006, 34-39