1. Let us Become God’s Friends!

It is good to have friends. A friend is someone with whom we can fully open our hearts and minds. A friend unconditionally accepts us without any reservation or prejudice. Without a close friend we have no one to share our innermost feelings-- our fears, our anxieties, our sorrows, our hopes, and our joys

Friendship is the highest degree of relationship. There is unconditional acceptance of each other in friendship. A friendship should be the goal of every relationship. A husband-wife relation needs to grow to a friendship. All family relations and social relations need to grow to friendships. Friendship is the ideal relationship not only for individuals but also for families, communities, and even for nations. The world will be a heaven if all people are friendly to one another, if all communities are friendly to one another, and if all nations are friendly to one another.

As it is important to make and keep friends, we need to actively seek friendships. Smile at someone, and he/she smiles back at you. That can be the beginning of a friendship, and as long as you wish for the wellbeing of that friend, the friendship remains. A friendship is based on an agreement-- you will unconditionally accept each other, and you will seek the wellbeing mutually. There is absolute freedom in a friendship because you don't possess a friend. Love springs from absolute freedom.  

It is not easy to keep a friendship. The closer a friendship grows, the harder it becomes to keep it. If you do anything that is against the agreement of friendship, it breaks. If you make any attempt to constrict or restrict the freedom of your friend, you lose a friend. You don't order a friend; you only request. You don't expect anything from a friend; you only accept your friend unconditionally. You take from a friend only what he/she gives you. If you allow a friendship to remain broken, your friend can eventually become your worst enemy. So it is important to mend broken relationships. If the mistake was on your part, you need to apologize for your mistake and seek forgiveness. If the friendship was broken due to a misunderstanding, you need to try to clear it. A friendship is precious, and it should be kept at any cost.

Our relation with God also needs to grow to a friendship. John, the apostle, says in his epistle that we need to have a fellowship with God. Friendship might be a better translation. We need an unconditional acceptance and openness with God. Garden of Eden is our ideal where God and man live in friendship. John in a vision sees the Garden of Eden reestablished when God lives among people in friendship. In our world, we have rejected the friendship of God, and so we live in enmity with God. We need to take the initiative to mend the broken relationship and reestablish our friendship with God. God is always there with open arms, and all we have to do is to clear our misunderstanding of God, and return.

Christmas is the story of how God comes down to our level as a human being to live among us and to let us know that God loves us unconditionally. Christmas is about Emmanuel, God with us on our side. Once we see the unconditional love of God fully manifested before us, how can we hold ourselves back from responding with unconditional love?

Prayer is communication with God. If God is a friend to us, we will enjoy the time we spend with God, and we will always look forward to such a time. When God is a friend, the question of why we pray becomes absurd. It is something that we enjoy doing, and it is an end in itself. Prayer involves not only talking to God but also listening to God. It is easier to talk than to listen. We can listen only with our inner ear. We can make it active only if we develop the ability to keep our senses in our control, and learn to pay attention.   

A saint is someone who responds to the unconditional love of God and love God in return, and becomes a friend of God. We read in the Bible that Abraham was a friend of God. We also read that Enoch walked with God during his lifetime. One needs to be a close friend to someone to walk with that person. Jesus once told his disciples that he prefers to call them his friends. God is pictured as a friend to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. God comes to the garden everyday to spend time with them. However, they break their agreement of friendship with God. Although they have the option to apologize for their mistake, they do not care to do so.

God continues to invite us to live in a close friendship with him. It is a call to become saints! Can there be a greater opportunity for us? God invites us individually and as communities. In fact God invites the entire human community to be in friendship with God. We spend time with God as individuals and as communities. When a community meets to spend time with God, we call it worship.  

When we spend time with God, we slowly gain the likeness of God. In Greek it is called theosis. Each time we spend time with God, our inner being gets purified, renewed, and gain more strength and health. As Prophet Isaiah reminds us, those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint (Isa 40:31). Just like we take a shower once or twice everyday, our inner being needs a shower to remain clean. Just as we seek the help of a physician when we get sick, we need to seek the help of God when our inner being gets sick. Just as our body needs food, our inner being also needs food, which is the knowledge of how to live according to the will of God (John 4:34).

When we spend time with God as a community, our relationships among ourselves get stronger. We will gain the will to forgive and seek forgiveness. We will be able to support one another and work together as the members of the same body.

Thus the time we spend in prayer/worship provides us with a very strong foundation upon which we build up a fruitful life. In the following pages, we will read about it in more detail.

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