Our pastor spoke today about not living your life to please other people, but to please the Lord. It got a lot of thoughts stirring up in me. One of them was my friend Rhonda.

Whoa--I just realized I never recapped her stay in December with us. Hmm.

So, a brief recap of my history with Rhonda. First of all, she's been a friend of our family since we were 4. Her religious background has been...tempestuous. She grew up in a very legalistic church, then was sent to a special "Christian" school that was fraught with physical and emotional abuse, not to mention witchcraft and other Satanic influences. I lost touch with her, more or less, while she was at that school, so I've been absent for the most tempestuous years, but what I have learned since reconnecting with her in the last year is that she basically threw the baby out with the bathwater, and lived a destructive lifestyle rebelling against just about every "Christian" rule out there. She reformed from one or two of those things, but then she discovered, like many of my well-educated Gen Y peers, intellectualism and philosophy. And that has poisoned her the way it has poisoned many others of my generation (and many, many other generations before mine...Atheists and agnostics are frequently extremely well-educated people).

She approached us last year, or perhaps the tail end of 2010, expressing a desire to know more about Christianity. Stephen and I both thought, "Fantastic, she's looking for Christ! Perhaps God has brought her into our lives so we can give her just the one little extra push to get her over the line." Not that we thought it was up to ourselves to convert her, but we really thought it was an expression of readiness to commit her life to Christ, and that the Lord was ready to use us as whatever else she needed to get her to Him.

Well, we had lots of talks with her over the year about being a Christian, trying to tell her why it's important to us and why we believe that it is truth. It was tough, but we hoped and prayed we were making progress. At the end of the year, we agreed to let her stay with us for a short time in December.

But on that trip we found out for sure that she wasn't anywhere near Christ. It turned out she was only interested in intellectually discussing on Christianity, and resisted any time we tried to make the talks more personal. Steve and I both felt distinct spiritual warfare while she stayed with us. It was exhausting, and the trip ended at a solid stalemate.

So we know now that there isn't anything further we can do to bring her closer to Christ; the rest is up to God and her. But now the question is, how do we continue the friendship? On the one hand, I feel as though she might get even angrier at God if we just drop out of her life all of a sudden. But on the other hand, given that she didn't start pursuing a friendship with us until she began intellectually exploring Christianity, and that's what all our conversations centered around, I feel as though we have nothing left to talk about. Steve's and my entire lives center around how we relate to the truth of the Gospel. And Rhonda is actively rebelling against it. I can't imagine that any of our conversations from here on out will be peaceful, unless we cut out the hearts of our being and defer to meaningless conversations about the weather. And even the weather centers on who God is and how we relate to Him! "For he makes the sun to rise on both the good and the evil; he sends the rain on the just and the unjust." Matt. 5:45

So I don't know what to do. It's a very difficult line to walk--this friends-with-nonbelievers business. I've never had to walk it quite like this before.

What this has to do with Paul's sermon today, I'm not sure. :) But it got me thinking, all right.

-Stephanie

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