A sixty-second lament

I wish someone could have explained this phenomenon to me three decades ago as lucidly as Naked Pastor put it in his post.  

I’ve been fooled again by relationships I thought were friendships, but those relationships withered (and in a couple of painful cases, incinerated) when one or the other of us left the congregation that first brought us together. I’m amazed that the kind of intimacy that grows when you’re in the trenches of one another’s lives is not able to survive a transition to being in two different locations at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning. I grieve that the implicit promise of loyalty that comes with faithfully following God doesn’t equal loyalty to a measure of the friendships that form in a church.

I’ve let triangulation shape some of my responses to people who were looking for a friendship, not just a spiritual co-worker. I regret that I neglected some relationships that were meant to be gifts of friendship in my life. And I mourn all that’s been lost to me over the years through church conflicts and ruptures.

Faithful, unchanging Friend, have mercy on us.