How Well Do I Know You?

What does it mean to be an authentic Christian friend in a world where we are faced with advertising such as the Shortland St billboard that asks – How well do you really know them? This line hangs above pictures of two of the main Shorty St characters at an intersection where I am often stopped at a red light. I find myself sitting there pondering this concept. How can I know them? They are just characters in a TV show. It raises this question for me -Are our neighbours so lonely that they think their friends are those ‘people’ that they see on the TV screen five nights a week? I am challenged to ask myself -Can we honestly say that we see any of our friends as often as we see the characters in our favourite TV show?

My students were discussing what the implications of being a radical Jesus follower means for our friendships. We are coming together each week to challenge and support each other to live more radically Christ centred lives. We feel that part of this is considering the way that Christian friendships are different from those who are not yet Jesus followers.

One of the challenges for our Christian friendships is how we use modern communication technologies well. Is scoring 10/10 on a facebook quiz about superficial aspects of people’s lives really knowing them? Rather it is through those late night conversations about disappointments, hopes, dreams and experiences or absences of God that we get to know someone. Our friendships now often revolve around communications technology and they can be wonderful ways of connecting us to people in between face to face contact, yet I worry that facebook is taking over from having coffee with someone and that texting is taking over from going to visit someone. The result of this is that friendships are remaining superficial and never getting to the deeper level which enables lives to connect. People are desperately searching for community and friends yet they don’t want or don’t know how to make the commitment and effort needed to reach beyond the superficial.

As Christians we need to be challenged by the action of our God, who loved the world so much that he amazingly chose to become human, to be incarnated, to be able to stand face to face among us, so that the world could see and know God at a deeper level and to connect our lives with his. In turn, how do we live among our friends in such a way that our lives connect with theirs, and in turn we are able to connect their lives with Jesus?


Christina