Never Alone

MEET AMY BOUCHER PYE

A Note from Carol: I love giving some of my friends a voice on the Joy for the Journey blog. I can’t wait to share this post from Amy Boucher Pye. She’s a writer, speaker, retreat leader, and spiritual director. The author of six books, including 7 Ways to Pray, she makes her home in a lovely but drafty Victorian vicarage in North London with her family. Find her at amyboucherpye.com, where you can sign up to her monthly newsletter, including a prayer exercise, and on social media.

My friend Margaret* has been on watch for weeks, her mother nearing the end of her life. Margaret is one of my beloved FFF—fantabulous friends forever—a group of childhood friends whose connections became as strong as iron after one of us died at nineteen in a car crash. Margaret waits and watches and gathers with her family members around her mother, and we FFF wait with her. At times like these, being an ocean away from these beloved ones, I feel the limitations of geography. I can’t just pop over with a meal or some flowers. But I take comfort in, and hope from, my friendship with Jesus, the One who is not with me in bodily form but who loves me, encourages me, affirms me. I know that just as Jesus fills the gaps for me, so will he be present with Margaret and her loved ones. And he can bring Margaret to mind regularly so that I can lift her before God in prayer. 

I learned so much about friendship with Jesus when I wrote Transforming Love, an exploration of the relationships of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus with Jesus. These beloved siblings are those Jesus visited when he wanted rest and refreshment—he’d journey to their home in Bethany, two miles from Jerusalem, and receive their hospitality. They are named as those Jesus loves (John 11:5); indeed, the sisters are probably the most important women to Jesus outside of his mother. And yet he allows their brother to die when for four days he doesn’t travel to Bethany after they send word that Lazarus was sick. Jesus knows that his beloved friends faced a tsunami of grief as their brother died, but he doesn’t alleviate their pain just then.

We, with a fuller picture, can understand that Jesus allowed a bigger purpose to flow from Lazarus’s death, namely bringing Lazarus back from the dead and therefore confirming that he is the Messiah, the anointed One who will bring salvation to many. But at the time Mary and Martha didn't know that. They only feel his absence. 

Both women utter the same words, but at different moments, to Jesus when he arrives in Bethany: “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21, 32). Jesus meets each woman in her place of need. With Martha he holds a conversation where she declares that he’s the Messiah (in doing so she’s only one of three in the New Testament to acknowledge this before his death and resurrection). With Mary he grieves with her—that shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35)—and then takes action, raising Lazarus from the dead. 

Jesus pours out his love on both women, even as he does for us today. But we might wonder how he can be such a close friend to us—after all, we can’t meet him for coffee. How can Jesus be our friend like he was for Martha and Mary?

Although we don’t have Jesus in physical form—yet!—we have the amazing gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus promised his friends that after he died, he would send the Spirit to be with them: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:16–18). 

This means that we have the Holy Spirit living with and in us. Amazingly, we’re never alone; God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit takes up residence with us in our very beings. God through his Spirit touches us when we’re lonely; he brings to mind a friend in need whom we can text or go see; he gives us the sweet sleep that restores our mood and our body. Thus Jesus can change us from within, helping us to love others with sacrificial love; to trust him for our well-being; to live unshackled by fear.

Friendship with Jesus changes us because of our moment by moment relationship with him. Like Martha we can enjoy a conversation with him; like Mary we can express our deep sorrow and disbelief that he seemingly wasn’t there for us in our time of need. Jesus will envelop us in his love each and every day, thereby changing us to be more like him as we grow in our love for him. He’s our best friend ever.