"I Don't Have a Single Friend in this World," He Said!

The statement came like a lightning bolt out of the blue, entirely unexpected. Standing off a moment from cutting my hair, my barber said, rather abruptly, "I'm not sure you'll believe this, but I'm a very insecure person. I don't have a single friend in this world!"

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. An apparently gregarious person with an inviting smile, and a good conversationalist as most barbers are, we had shared stories over time--and, of course, jokes--typical barbershop banter. But this time there was more. It was significant I soon realized that two other barbers in his small shop were not there that day. Nor were any clients waiting to be served.

"All these years in your barbershop and you don't have a single friend?" I responded. "I can't believe it." Returning to task, he filled in on details. "As I said, I'm a very insecure person, and long for a friend, but every time I come on someone I think could be a friend--someone that seems higher and wiser than me--I come over time to see flaws that eventually cause me to reject them out of hand."

"Are there other problems with you, more personal? I wondered. "Yes," he responded, "alcohol among them. Could we talk sometime?"

How moving the conversation was for me, a client of his now over 14 years, myself on that very day in the midst of preparations for leading an Adult Sunday School Class on "Friendship Evangelism" less than two weeks later.

As it turned out, the class I led was yesterday, the basic thrust of which, using a beautiful one-hour hourglass as an object lesson, was that we as Christians in this world are simply the overflow of God's friendship toward us and that unless we are living daily in that flow our witness to others gets wooden and stale.

Today, not over lunch as he wished--my barber friend is taking his mother to the doctor this morning--but over coffee in Stillwater at 1:30 he and I are going to have that talk. I'm going to become the friend he is missing, God helping me. He'll soon enough discover my foibles and faults as well, educated and perceptive as he is. But I'm praying early this morning that in, with, and under all that--even perhaps in the midst of my own vulnerabilities--he will sense and come over time to receive not only the friendship of God, who is the healer of all our ills, but the warm and healing communion of his people as well.

Pray that I will not get in the way of the Friend who has thus set the stage for our coming together as human beings. Surely he is even now standing by our place of meeting to draw us together to himself.