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Draw near: Praying to act like a friend

Lynne Baab • Tuesday April 25 2023

Six years ago, I won an award for an article arguing that to be a neighbor we need to nurture our listening skills. (That’s the only time I’ve won an award for an article. It was a cool moment.) Here’s the opening to the article:

Many years ago, I heard a sermon on the prodigal son. “Who is my neighbor?” the teacher of the law asks Jesus (Luke 10:29). In response, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. At the end of the story, Jesus asks, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands...

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Draw Near: Praying to love our limits

Lynne Baab • Tuesday April 18 2023

Take a look at this cool book title: You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News. I truly love that title, which seems increasingly relevant as I get older and experience the limitations (and even humiliations) of aging. The author is Kelly M. Kapic, a professor of theology at Covenant College, who has written numerous books. This latest book, with the title I find captivating, was published in 2022.

In an interview in Christianity Today, Dr. Kapic mentions the gap between our high expectations of ourselves and the limits we live with. He says this gap probably comes...

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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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