Under the weather friend

Image from: prayer - Bing images

My parents have a portrait of this image hanging in their home and it has been there for as long as I can remember. It has always served as a reminder to be grateful unto God for providing to us what we need. Prayer is a very powerful thing.

I have been a little under the weather this week and while no one enjoys feeling ill, the phrase 'under the weather' got my mind working and it brought me to the concept of the 'fair-weather friend.' I think we have all heard of the 'fair-weather friend,' which is referring to the person in your life that only seems to have the time of day for you when everything is going well. There is no turbulence, no hiccups, no problems going on in your life, so they choose those times to be a 'friend' to you. The reason this saying is so common is because we all know someone like this; someone who really runs away as soon as they learn you might need help. Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, and Tracy Lawrence came together in 2014 to release "Find Out Who Your Friends Are," which is a song entirely based upon weeding out the fair-weather friends from your life and seeing who would come to your aid when you were on the side of the road in the middle of the night. This concept of knowing who really has your back when the chips are down versus who only sees you as someone they want to be around when there are no issues going on, can sometimes be difficult to discern, but is a common conundrum, nonetheless.

Usually when our life is in shambles, we are so focused on the problem itself and handling whatever it is internally, we find a few loved ones to lean on and appreciate, but it can be so easy to overlook those who ran from the problem or who were simply absent. On top of this, we can quickly find ourselves making excuses for those who did not help or rush to our side, as they could be going through their own problems at the time that we were unaware of. Regardless, my point is that fair-weather friends are often difficult to pinpoint, but once you begin to recognize that there will be people in your life that use your kindness as a way to take advantage of you, the shallowness of the relationship you have with them becomes apparent.

I am sure you have noticed by now that I did not title this article 'Fair-weather friend,' but rather it is called 'Under the weather friend' because I want to explore the other side of this extreme. Yes, we all have friends that only want to be around you when you are soaring through life, but what about the friends that only come to you when they want you to fix something for them? The people who really do not make time for you unless there is a problem in their lives and they seek you out, regardless of what you may be handling at the moment and they swoop in to add one more thing to your plate, to ask one more favor, to need your help when they have been absent for weeks on end.

Let's address the idea of absence in relationships really quickly. I think we all have valuable friendships that do not require daily, or even weekly, interactions. You go about your life, and they go about theirs and when you reconnect, you can pick up right where you left off. These positive relationships are not the ones I am referring to when I talk about the under the weather friend. No, I am talking about the same spectrum as the fair-weather friend, the spectrum that depends upon the usage of you, the usage of your kindness, the ones that challenge us and make us walk the line between our Christian identity and our human flesh. We question how to approach relationships like this once we have identified them and it can be difficult to know how and even if we should put distance between ourselves and this person. We, as Christians, want to help others in times of need, but can truly feel used and abused when they do nothing but call on us to help them out, with little or no consideration and rarely any contributions to the relationship.

No one wants to have an under the weather friend, but I think we all do. I think we all have at least a few people that have really made us feel like doormats, really have abandoned us in our own times of need but are the first to knock on our doors with a grocery list of things we can do for them when they are down and out. No, none of us want these friends. However, more importantly I think that none of us want to be the under the weather friend. None of us want to use our peers this way, to only call them up when we need help. I think it is safe to say that if we are doing this to ones we really care about, we are not doing it on purpose and need to reevaluate those friendships. Additionally, if we are doing this on purpose, we are failing to use God's love to love others and really must look inward and upward to see how to adjust our viewpoint. When we shift the lens from who we might know that use us to who we might know that we use, we could find ourselves reflecting on our relationship with God.

Our relationship with God should be the most valuable and important relationship that we can work on. Finding ways to strengthen it, build upon it, feed it, and reflect on it, is the best way to find peace, find joy, and be the best child of the Lord we can be. Colossians 4:2 tells us to "Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving." However, I think at some point each one of us has become the under the weather friend when it comes to our relationship with God. Let's explore this for a moment. Life can get busy in an instant; we can change jobs, move homes, have relationship turbulence, have exams, etc. We can so easily fall out of our routines that the time we spend with God each day gets smaller and smaller until all of a sudden it is almost nonexistent. We become absent in the relationship with God. We fail to contribute anything to our relationship with God. Until something goes wrong; we get sick, we lose a loved one, we have financial difficulties, etc. What do we do when something goes wrong? We turn to God of course. Turning to God in times of need is no sin, in fact, Psalm 55:22 tells us to "Give your burdens to the Lord, and He will take care of you. He will not permit the godly to slip and fall." We should bring our troubles and lay them at the cross, but my point in bringing all of this up is that a relationship built on nothing but us calling on God for His help is no real relationship at all.

The problem is not when we come to God with our issues, but it comes in when we only go to Him with a grocery list of things that He can do for us, dismissing the love and care He has and only trying to use Him for our own benefit. The problem is when we no longer contribute any time, effort, or valuable consideration to this relationship. Relationships are truly a give and take and when we are doing nothing but taking, we find we have become the under the weather friend. God is not meant to serve us, we are meant to serve Him, and in order to do that, we should really recognize that God blesses us and helps us when we are in need, not because He has to, but because He loves us. With the busyness of life, we sometimes miss this part. We miss that the Lord wants to have a relationship with us, He wants us to know Him, to walk with Him, to trust Him in all times, not just in the bitter and sad ones. Philippians 4:6 states "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." We let the chaos and noise of this world overtake the time we designated for God each day and drift into absence within our relationship with The One who loves us most.

Think of how much we miss when we only look to Him when we are falling apart. We fail to understand how He plays an important role in all of it, each and every step of our lives, and instead we create this false idea that we do not need the Lord unless we call upon Him. How far this is from the truth! Jeremiah 10:23 tells us that "I know, Lord, that our lives are not our own. We are not able to plan our own course." We need God all the time, in every aspect, in every way. We are corrupted by our own arrogance, pride, and perception of self-worth and often we allow these parts of our sinful flesh to corrupt the way we interact with our Father. It can cause us to put it on the backburner. God will always be there, right? Well, yes, He will always welcome us back into His arms after we have wandered away, but how does this help us in our spiritual growth? 1 Peter 5:6-7 tells us to "Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time: Casting all your care on Him; for He cares for you." In order to grow as a person, as a child of God, as a student of His wonder, and also in order to bring others to Christ, save souls through being a vessel of His light, and to guide people to His love, we must remind ourselves that our relationship with God is the most important relationship we could ever work on. He loves us and we should respect and value His love by giving back to the relationship with Him. When the Lord is at the core of everything we touch, do, say, and think, everything falls right into place. We handle the bad times better, we appreciate the good times more, we give more glory to His name, and so on. This is what I mean when I say that we need God all of the time. We cannot last one second without Him, and to remember that is to value God more than only in times of trial.

How do we talk to God? We pray, right? Prayer is our personal way to talk with the Lord, to open our hearts and minds and bear our souls to Him, so that we can build a relationship on honesty, thankfulness, and trust. Jeremiah 29:12-13 reminds us that "Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart." Our heart must be in the right place in order to truly have a meaningful prayer life and a meaningful relationship with God. When we allow ourselves to forget to pray with honesty, thankfulness, and trust, we can quickly find ourselves as the under the weather friend. We dismiss the ways in which God loves us and works through us even when we are not struggling, and we focus on the hardships that we are enduring. When we come to the Lord with our grocery list of things we need Him to do for us, we fail to acknowledge that sometimes God's answer of 'no' is what is in our best interest. We fail to "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5). We are to serve God, not the other way around, and because God is almighty and He loves His children, He will always give us what we need, even if we do not understand it at the time. 'No' is not always the answer we want, but it serves as another reason to walk intimately with Christ, so we can trust in His work and believe in His answers. As mentioned earlier, when we find ourselves absent instead of working on our relationship, we can find the ways in which we talk with God very one-sided and selfish. Prayers are intimate, they are personal, and taking the opportunity to talk with the Lord about being grateful for our blessings, His love, and His guidance, can truly bring us closer to God. My point is that we really can use prayer as a way to express our gratitude to the Lord for walking with us through every journey, for being able to trust that He will see us through each step, and to listen for His voice so that we may know Him, in every season of life, including both the times of trial and the times of joy.

In this way, when we use our prayer life as a way to build a relationship with God, we can focus on making the time we spend with God the most important part of our days. We can spend our time in and out of prayer contributing to our relationship with the Father by representing His love and letting Him guide our hearts. When we do this, we can prevent ourselves from becoming the under the weather friend, and we can see the multifaceted relationship with the Lord grow and strengthen because we are coming to Him with a humble heart, an open mind, and an ambition to be called upon to do His work.