A Friendship Fork?

In the week following Charlie Kirk’s murder, I found myself sharing dinner with close friends, the kind you instinctively think of as “your people.” We attend the same church, have a similar sense of humor, and have spent many hours over back porch meals wrestling with honest, heart-wrenching questions about the ups and downs of life:  Should our kids get a phone this Christmas? What does it look like to navigate grief with faith and courage? How does one carry the weight of a job loss? You get the idea. And I hope you’ve been fortunate to find a small tribe of treasured friends like these. 

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve said aloud to each other: “Let’s not get swept up in the noise; let’s tend to the people and places God has given us.” But that night, the conversation turned to Kirk – his work, his faith, his death. To my surprise, my friends began to voice something new. There was a palpable shift in the air. For them, Kirk’s death was more than tragic. It was almost apocalyptic – and seemed to portend such dangerous cultural currents that our (shared) life of quiet faithfulness might no longer be enough. What started as us unpacking what was happening ‘out there’ became them very much asking something like: “Is it time to step into the bigger battle? Is it time to acknowledge there is a battle raging?” The implication in their thoughts and questions was clear: the world had changed and maybe we needed to change, too. 

To be clear, they weren’t talking about doing anything all that dramatic. But their shift in posture, from trusting in the value of that ‘long obedience in the same direction’ to feeling under threat and needing to somehow go on offense – was unmistakable and the conversation left me reeling.

Suddenly, years of back porch conversations came into question. Were we really as aligned as I thought? How could they be considering (what sounded to me like) such a major pivot? Was this a fork in the road for our friendship? For how I think about my own calling? Was I somehow naïve to the world around me and holding on to outdated views of tending to what’s closest to me? And most of all: What did their changing default mode say about how I’ve found comfort in my ‘settled’ understanding of the world?

When the Table Starts to Splinter

If you spend enough time with someone – even someone you love and trust – you will eventually find something about which you deeply, passionately, uncomfortably disagree. It’s not a question of if, but of when.

And when it comes, the friendship you’ve built together will feel wobbly. What seemed like a forever friendship might start to feel brittle, and you begin to wonder if you somehow missed something along the way. How could I have missed this?!, you might ask. I thought I understood what was going on here?!, you might think. Am I still safe in this relationship?!, you might wonder.

It’s one thing to “stay at the table” when the issue is minor. It’s quite another when the conversation touches something you hold sacred – whatever that might be – and when it threatens to unravel your worldview or challenge your sense of moral clarity. It’s especially hard to stay when you know that so many of your values and priorities align, only to be (seemingly) undone by this new discovery, or a shift in the wind.

At this point, the invitation to ‘stay’ starts to feel costly. Maybe even painful. And it’s exactly where the language The After Party faith & politics course becomes so helpful. Because the challenge isn’t just whether we stay – but how we stay.

Choosing the Way of Jesus (Even Now)

The conversation on my back porch, and my reaction to it, revealed for me the power of two competing and equally dangerous lies; both of which are uniquely tempting in this fraught political climate. Like all good lies – these are quiet, subtle, and all the more dangerous because they often parade as wisdom,  and we allow ourselves to think we’re doing the right thing when everyone around us has gone mad. 

The first lie tells us “I’m above all this.” This is the idol of detachment, clothed in the garb of spiritual maturity. We convince ourselves we’re somehow ‘better than’ those entangled in the political and cultural fray. We imagine we’ve transcended the mess and then judge those who can’t seem to do the same. It might cause us to think: “I’m too spiritually and emotionally mature to roll up my sleeves and get dirty in that conversation.” We think it looks like a quiet confidence that we’ve already done the research, reached the correct conclusions, and have no need to engage further. However, what we’re really doing is closing our minds and hardening our hearts, perhaps even prematurely. 

We mistake “I’m right” with “I’ve reached peak wisdom on this topic” and tell ourselves that by holding messy conversations at bay, we’re actually being virtuous. But this isn’t spiritual maturity, it’s self-deception. It disconnects us from those around us – even those we hold dear – and tries to exempt us from the hard, ongoing work of figuring out how to show up as Jesus-followers in a complicated and noisy public square. 

Perhaps most tragically, it was this lie that led me to grow very quiet during that back porch dinner—to silently judge my friends for “giving up,” and to fail to do the very thing I should have done: ask them to “tell me more,” explore the boundaries of their new thinking, and affirm the many areas of common agreement we still shared.

The second lie pulls in the opposite direction. It tells us “things are so bad that the way of Jesus no longer applies.” When the stakes feel generational, even existential, believing in the Sermon on the Mount starts to feel naïve. Turning the other cheek? Loving our enemies? Surely that was for some other, more civil time. Not for today. Faithfully following the commands of Jesus starts to feel like it is not enough and we begin to think we are somehow critical to the whole enterprise of saving the world.

But this is also hubris. In believing this lie, we position ourselves – not Jesus – as the ultimate solution to what ails humanity. And we end up serving a kingdom, but it’s not his. We slowly – or maybe all at once – lose faith in what we once knew to be the Jesus way and begin to sharpen our elbows for a fight we think only we can win.

I won’t presume to know if my porch friends were drifting towards this particular lie, but one doesn’t need to look far to see how seductive it can be to believe that you are the answer the world has been waiting for. To believe what appears to be a simple solution to the complex issues that have vexed humanity for so very long, and to believe that by refusing to jump on a given bandwagon, you might singlehandedly thwart God’s long, slow redemptive work in this world.

Both lies, whichever you might be most tempted to believe, are rooted in the same error: we’ve forgotten who we are, and who God is. 

How shall we then live?

We resist.

We resist the first lie by showing up with hope and humility. We resist the second lie by refusing to let our fear override our obedience to what is true. In both cases, we resist the temptation to think more highly of ourselves than we ought. And we put on the full armor of God, all the while asking God to show us what he means by that, and what it looks like to do so in the sphere he’s given us to influence.

Here’s a promise: ‘where sin increased, grace increased all the more.’ If you’ve found yourself recoiling in silence or reacting in judgment, you’re not alone. If you’ve wondered whether the way of Jesus is enough for these times, you are in good company.

And here’s what we , you and me,  can be certain is true. Even in our confusion,  in our ego trips and silent fears, Jesus does not flinch. Mercifully, his grace doesn’t wait for us – or our friends – to be perfect. He continues to call us forward, further up and further in. And even when the table starts to wobble, especially then – it may still be the holiest place to be. After all, although staying, really staying , might not always feel like the right move, it might just be the most faithful move you can make today. 

Written by Redeeming Babel’s Director of Engagement