From Loss to Gain: Finding Peace By Embracing Jesus As My Friend
If you don’t already follow Megan Ashley’s “In Totality” podcast, you should! Like many of us, I learned of Megan Ashley through her first podcast with B. Simone and have stayed connected to her journey since.
I recently watched Megan Ashley’s podcast featuring Trinity Mitchell. The ladies discussed both Megan’s and Trinity’s powerful personal journeys of friendship, loss, grief, forgiveness, and healing.
This episode was eerily timely and gave language to a part of my own journey.
For the past several months, the Holy Spirit has graciously been carrying me through a new normal as I navigate the most difficult and painful relationship loss I have ever experienced.
In the beginning, I struggled to understand why God would allow this sisterhood to fall apart right now.
In this season of my life. Where almost everything is new and uncomfortable enough already.
A season where, in my mind, I needed that friendship the most.
Didn’t God know that, outside of my husband, she was my person?
“For the past several months, the Holy Spirit has graciously been carrying me through a new normal as I navigate the most difficult and painful relationship loss I have ever experienced.”
The one I called on for the most minute detail?
Who would dress me for all these upcoming events, help me choose hairstyles and counsel me on which opportunities sound like ones I should take?
Who would I run my ideas past? Who am I supposed to run the scenario past to make sure I’m not tripping?
To be clear, I don’t believe that God caused the unfortunate circumstances that has effectively ended this friendship. But the thing about our God is that He is a promise keeper. So, when He says that He will cause ALL things to work together for our good, He stands on that.
Through the excruciating grief, I’ve forced myself to view this suffering through that promise. In doing so, I allowed the God I’ve known personally and deeply as Father, Miracle Worker, Way Maker, Comforter, Promise Keeper, My Lord and Savior, Protector, Redeemer, and Wise Counselor, to finally reveal himself to me as Friend.
I realized that as beautiful and necessary as healthy friendships are, they were never meant to replace the role of Jesus as our first and closest friend. I realized that I had been missing out all these years.
For the first time it dawned on me that I had not ever truly seen Jesus as my friend.
I had sung the songs. Read the verses. But the deep revelation of God as my friend?
My heart hadn’t fully embraced this truth. So much so that my spirit’s initial response was to try to replace that friendship with others. The Lord allowed every attempt to fail until one day I simply surrendered.
I began going to God with the minutia instead.
Instead of crying in the hair store because I couldn’t simply FaceTime my dear friend and ask what products to get, I called on Jesus.
Before melting down because I couldn’t text good news and successes, I thanked God for the blessings.
Rather than wallowing in sadness and hurt, I went to God in prayer and allowed Him to expose all the ways that I, myself, am not the friend I claim I desire from others.
“For the first time it dawned on me that I had not ever truly seen Jesus as my friend.
I had sung the songs. Read the verses. But the deep revelation of God as my friend?
My heart hadn’t fully embraced this truth.”
My new friendship with Jesus convicted me and showed me how I keep track and hold wrongs in my heart. How I tally when I show up and it’s not reciprocated.
Through friendship with Jesus, I’m learning how I’ve often operated from a place of fear in friendships, not love. Fear of rejection and abandonment.
But Jesus’s love through this time is showing me that I am neither rejected nor abandoned. Not with Him as my friend.
He opened my heart to all the other friendships He’s blessed me to have and helped me to understand that while they will never replace the one I lost, they are purposed in the most beautiful way.
These truths plant themselves more deeply by the day.
Chain Breakers, I want you to ask yourselves like I had to, is God your person?
Do you go to Him first in all things?
Is it possible that you’ve made an idol of the friendships God has blessed you with?
I encourage you to trust God with the pain and discomfort that some of these answers may cause. Trust His promise to work all things together for our good and His glory. Trust that He is good and that He is our friend.
“Jesus’s love through this time is showing me that I am neither rejected nor abandoned.
Not with Him as my friend.”
I am so grateful for this new and budding friendship with the Lord.
I am still walking this journey in real time. The layers continue to unravel. I continue to grieve and look forward to being on the other side of this pain.
But I would not trade what this experience is producing in me for anything.
Now, if you ask me, I could’ve learned all this from watching Megan and Trinity. But chile I’m just a girl!
Today, I am grateful to have a friend who would literally die to be close to me.
🗣️ Sound off in the COMMENTS: what do you love most about having Jesus as a friend?
I love y’all.
Freely,
Latiera
