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Draw near: Praying about friendship and freedom

Lynne Baab • Wednesday April 12 2023

A group of people called Proto-Indo-Europeans lived north of the Caspian and Black Seas between 4500 and 2500 B.C. Linguists hypothesize they had a unified language with a verb meaning “to love or please.” Over centuries, those people moved west into what is now Germany, Scandinavia, and England. The word meaning “to love or please” morphed into two different nouns, one meaning “lover, friend” and the other “beloved, not in bondage.” Both words had the same beginning letters, but the former had “nd” at the end. Later, in Old English, these words became “frēond” and “frēo.” In recent centuries these words...

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Draw near: Praying about friendships and loneliness

Lynne Baab • Tuesday April 4 2023

Susan and Clair had very different experiences of friendship during the pandemic. For Susan, the loneliness of the pandemic left lasting challenges. For Clair, the pandemic was a time of relational overload that raised ongoing questions. [1]

Susan retired in early 2019. In those first months of retirement, she realized how much her relational cup had been filled by her work in a busy realty office. In her last years of work, she had also volunteered on Tuesdays at a community dinner at her church, attended church on Sundays and enjoyed chatting with folks afterwards, and often got together with various friends...

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Draw near: Praying to be present when people change

Lynne Baab • Tuesday March 7 2023

The week before Valentine’s Day, a friend posted a quotation on Facebook. Since then I have returned over and over to this quotation, which is increasingly relevant as I get older, and as my family members and friends are aging, too:

“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back...

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Holy Spirit disruptions: Unexpected friends

Lynne Baab • Friday September 3 2021

I am almost finished re-reading the alphabet mystery series by Sue Grafton. Actually, when I got to “V is for Vengeance,” I realized I had missed it, so that book was a read, not a re-read. Grafton’s sleuth, Kinsey Millhone, has become a friend over the years as I have read the series several times. She’s not a close friend, evidenced by the fact that the last time I re-read the early books was about a decade ago, but I enjoy her quirks and the details she observes that I would miss.

For other books, the main character, or one of the...

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