Learning from Adam how not to communicate

     Friends don’t let friends drive drunk . This old bumper sticker reminds us that as we allow the Word to make us like Himself we will not encourage our friends in ways that lead to death and sometimes we will even have to say something to them. Three of our children have experienced life and death situations with their friends—two they saved from death and one they didn’t.

     In one of these situations, our daughter was swimming in the ocean with a group of college friends. She decided to swim in to the beach but then noticed a man swimming out further than her and she decided to go check on him. She asked if he was going in and he said, No. No, she asked?  No, he was too tired. Warning bells went off for her and, after trying for 15 minutes different ways to save him from drowning, she got him rescued by swimming in and getting a surf board and some friends. The second situation involved a friend of my son’s who was frequently threatening suicide. But one time she acted differently. She had told some of her friends the deadline, the method, and had written letters to everyone. Our son asked us what he should do. Our family jumped in, late at night, finally having to call the police who went to her house. We then kinda adopted her and she is following Christ today. In the third experience, our son was in a public junior high school and he had a friend there that was very different and who had no friends other than my son. My son didn’t talk about him to us and never did anything with him outside of school. But after our son switched to a private school, he heard two months later that that boy had committed suicide, at 13.
 
     Tuesday I tried to show how Adam failed in his love for Eve (here). He didn’t rescue her, but instead joined her in sin. In July I wrote on the idea of Christians becoming little Loves (here). As Francis of Assisi said, “We become little Christs.” We also become “little Loves.” Putting these two ideas together in the Theology of the Body context, the church embraces a lifestyle of holiness, not to separate from the world but because it is the only way that leads to Love. God’s direction to Adam in Eve in Genesis 1:28 was to become rescuing stewards of creation;  therefore,  friends don’t let friends continue in ways that lead away from Love and towards death. We don’t let them enter into adulterous relationships, divorce their spouses, commit fornication, etc without calling them on it and trying to rescue them from these paths that lead away from the true Love, and towards a life of death.
   
    Since Christ is the Word, Christians also become “little Words.” May we learn to speak the Word of life to those around us.