Circles of Friendship

As I was fundraising for this trip last year, I had a couple of thoughts that have been brought back to me recently.  One is the idea of Circles of Friendship.  Working in Special Education, I have talked to kids about their friendships.  One of the common ways to do this is by using the Cirlce of Friendship approach.  In this approach we have a diagram of cirlces where we ask the child to write their name in the middle.  We then ask them to move to the next circle and write the names of their family members and close friends, these are the people that they love the most.  The next circle is for aquantiances etc.  This activity continues and we talk to the child/teenager about relationships.  We do this for a sad reason... we live in a world with evil people who prey upon individuals with cognitive delays knowing that they can trick or abuse them.  They also know that if the individual has a communication delay, they may not be able to report physical and sexual abuse.  These kids/teenagers can be taken advantage of because they don't understand boundaries and we are attempting to educate them on who to trust, take care of, give their affection to.  One teenager that I worked with was being bullied at lunch.  A group of boys was telling him that if he was their friend, he would buy them snacks at lunch.  He bought them snacks and when we asked him where his money went, he explained that he was sharing with friends.  We knew that these boys were not his friends and that they were taking advantage of him.  Explaining the intricacies of who to trust, who to love and how to be a good friend is complicated.  When I was thinking about this concept of the circles of friendship, I felt like I agree with it as a method to teach children/teenagers how to be safe from abuse, but have we have gone astray by continueing to live in this diagram as Chrstan adults?

The first question that we should be asking is "whose name should be in the center?"  The next circle is reserved for our family, then our friends, then our co-workers, etc.  But where do we put the orphaned, the widow, the alien?  Chances are if we care for people moving from the inside out as the diagram indicates, we are exhausted and done by the time we get to the outer circle.   Maybe if we lived in a perfect world, this wouldn't be such a big deal because everyone would be in someones inner circle.  Unfortunately, we live in a broken world where that is not the case.  I just finished a book about sexual slavery in Cambodia.  The author explained that the victims of this evil industry are generally the desperatly poor and the orphaned.  They are people that aren't in the inner circle of many people, if they had advocates, the sex traffickers would most likely leave them alone.  There are thousands upon thousands that don't fall into the inner circles of anyone.... anyone but G0d.  

The Bible can't be clearer and can't say loudly enough that G0d cares for the needy (Proverbs 14:3, Deut. 10:17-18 etc.). It also can't be clearer that we are called to love who He loves (Proverbs 19:17, 1 John 4:7, Matthew 25:40 etc.).   In a book that I'm reading called "Pursuing Justice: The Call to Live and Die for Bigger Things,"  the author, Ken Wytsma talks about the connection between loving G0d and loving others.  He says, " If we care about the Kingdom, we work toward the same end as the King.  If we love someone, we love what that person loves.  GOd is absolutely clear about who and what He loves."  

As I've been reading through this book I've been asking myself how I can live a life that is more just, more loving and less selfish.   I feel like there are a couple of key steps.  The first is to take myself out of the center of the circle and put G0d there.   When I'm in the middle ugly things happen.  I live a life where I pursue my own agenda while desperatly trying to do something "good" so that I can sleep at night.  The result is that I exhaust myself by my good works while still having a heart that is in disarray.  My pet projects help me find momentary alleviation from guilt, but not peace.   I want G0d to give me eyes that see people the way that He sees them, a heart that aches for what His heart aches for and feet that travel where His feet travel.  To do this, He needs to be in the center.  Ken Wytsma says, "The way to do more justice is not simply to do more justice, it is to grow closer to the heart of God."   The other thought that I had is that I need to somehow rearrange my other circles.  This doesn't mean loving my family and friends less because I know that G0d has blessed me with them, but we are called to care for the "circleless."   

There are times when the sorrows of the world feel overwhelming.  There are so many people hurting, how can we fix such enormous issues when we feel so powerless?   That's when we turn to G0d.  We remember that this world is His creation and He goes before us and walks beside us on a fight that has been going on since the beginning of time.  We turn the sorrow over to G0d because it's too much for our human hearts to bear.  We put the people that we see living in heartwrenching situations into His hands because ours aren't strong enough.  We ask for wisdom on how to change what is our responsibility to change.  We ask for love that doesn't always come naturally to us.  We ask for endurance when we want to pack it up and go home.  We ask for forgiveness when we hate instead of love, are selfish instead of selfless, are judgemental instead of compassionate, are apathetic instead of energized and in doing all of these things we misrepresent our loving G0d is to the world.  And lastly, we cry out for G0d to help us reorganize our circles.