They Stopped Asking on Fridays

There is a moment at about ten past five on a Friday where the office changes frequency, and Hadi can hear it from his desk without looking up: chairs going back, somebody saying are we going then, the particular laugh people do when a week has just ended.

He used to be in that. For six years he was the one who organized it. He knew which place did food after nine and he had the number of a taxi firm in his phone that everybody else used. It was not a wild thing. It was eight or nine people from an office in a bar, most of them home by eleven.

They asked him for a while after he stopped. Three or four times. He said no each time, in a friendly way, because he could not think how to say yes to a bar for four hours and mean it.

Then they stopped asking, and there was no moment when they stopped, and nobody decided anything.

That was fourteen months ago.

He works with these people every day. They are perfectly warm to him. Ravi asks about his mother every single week and means it. Nobody has done a thing wrong. And at ten past five on a Friday the office changes frequency and he puts his headphones back in and finishes what he is doing and then drives home.

He would say, if you pushed him, that he is not lonely. He has a family. He would also say that he has stopped looking up at ten past five, and that he could not tell you exactly when he stopped.

You know that hour. It might be a Friday, a lunch, a Sunday five a side, a smoking door. Nobody excluded you. You said no a few times for good reasons and the asking dried up on its own, and there is nothing to complain about, and that is precisely what makes it sit in the chest.

You are named a friend by Jesus and you were never merely kept on as staff, and the naming was His idea before it was yours. He said I call you not servants, but I have called you friends, and the whole weight of the sentence is on who did the calling; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live fact at ten past five on a Friday afternoon.

I have called you friends

Let me name the weight, because it is a strange one and it does not get talked about.

This is a loss with no event in it. Nothing happened. There was no falling out, no conversation, no moment you could point at, and a loss with no event has nowhere to be filed. You cannot get over something that never occurred. So it stays where it is, low down, and it comes back every Friday at the same time, and you cannot mention it to anybody because the sentence they stopped asking me out sounds like a complaint about people who have not actually done anything.

So here is what Jesus says on the last night, and notice that He is the one doing the reclassifying.

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.John 15:15

He is not describing how they feel about Him. He is announcing a change in what they are, and He is doing it unilaterally. Nobody applied. Nobody earned the promotion by being especially good company that year, and one of them is about to deny Him three times before morning.

You are called a friend by somebody who did the naming Himself, and you were never in the position of hoping to be included. That is what stands written in John 15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a man sitting at a desk with his headphones in.

And look at the reason He gives, because it is the definition of what He means by the word. For all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. The difference between a servant and a friend, in that sentence, is access. A servant is told what to do. A friend is told what is going on. He defines friendship as being let into the thinking.

You have been let into what God is doing and you were never kept at the level of instructions, and that access did not lapse when your Fridays changed. Scripture defines the friendship as things made known, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps doing the making known in a car on the drive home at half past five.

Now let me say something carefully about those eight or nine people, because it matters. They are not bad friends. They asked. You said no, for reasons that were right. They stopped, which is what happens, and it happened without malice or a decision. If you build a story where they abandoned you, you will get the relief of having somewhere to put the feeling, and you will pay for it by losing six good years that actually happened. Keep the six years. They were real.

You are able to grieve this without indicting anybody, and you were never going to be helped by making an enemy out of an ordinary human drift. The written word never once tells a person to settle a grief by finding somebody to blame, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a loss stay a loss and stay clean.

And the practical thing, said plainly here as everywhere on this site. The invitations that dried up were evening invitations, and evenings are not the only shape a friendship comes in. Ask somebody to something that is not an evening. And if the friend, the counselor, the group that meets on a weeknight where people say exactly this out loud, all of that is God's kindness with a face on it. Reaching for it is not a lesser road.