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Nurturing friendships in a cellphone world: Friendship with Christ and friendship with others

Lynne Baab • Friday January 11 2019

What difference does it make for human friendships that we are invited to be friends with Christ? (I wrote last week about Jesus’ invitation to us to be his friends.)

First and foremost, if our human friendships mirror the intimacy between the three persons of the Trinity, as well as reflecting the friendship between Jesus and humans, then we aren’t inventing friendship. Instead we are entering into something that is already happening and something that was patterned into us at creation because of the fact that we are made in God’s image.

Yes, the world is broken. Yes, the image of God in...

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Nurturing friendships in a cellphone world: Jesus as Friend

Lynne Baab • Friday January 4 2019

Last week I described the life-changing moment when I began to understand the implications of a new way of describing the image of God in humans. Scholars increasingly describe God’s image in us as our capacity for relationship.

I had another aha moment about ten years later. I was sitting in a rental car at a California beach on a blustery winter afternoon, reading the Bible, on my circuitous way from the airport to a conference. I read John 15:12-17, a passage that was familiar to me. This time I saw it in a new light.

On his last night with his disciples...

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Nurturing Friendships in a Cellphone World: Friendship with God

Lynne Baab • Thursday December 20 2018

When I was nineteen or twenty, a brand new Christian, I came across the idea that human beings are created in God’s image (see Genesis 1:26). I wondered what that meant, so I began asking older Christians I respected. The answer, given to me by several different people, was that humans are rational, like God is.

In the decades since I asked that question, Christian theologians have engaged in a burst of writing and thinking about the Trinity, emphasizing the intimate relationship between the persons of the Trinity. [1] What does it mean to be made in God’s image? Today, many theologians...

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Nurturing friendships in a cellphone world: Confidence about friendship

Lynne Baab • Thursday December 13 2018

Despite the challenges I’ve been writing about in recent posts, most of the people I interviewed for my book on friendship were confident they knew how to develop and nurture friendships. Many expressed frustration about the implications in their daily life of three obstacles mentioned in previous posts — the tendency of electronic communication to be impersonal, busy schedules, and friends who live far away — but only a few expressed concerns that they don’t really know how to go about making and keeping friends.

The generational patterns in the interviews were fascinating. Just about everyone with whom I spoke was concerned...

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