- Before I begin, I should tell you that I took Dr. Judge quite seriously when she told me that some of you
handle lightly, so please bear with me. I have known the Lord as my best friend for thirty years, and His
friendship has transformed my entire life. Forgive me for wishing that some of you might come to know that same
friendship, if you have not already.
- I am going to sing for you a song I wrote a number of years ago, a song about what the friendship of
operations to restore my ability to walk after a serious injury. It was not always clear that I would be walking
again, but the Lord was faithful and here I am today. In the middle of that trial, when I was bedridden with both of
my legs in casts, I wrote the following song about what the grace of God meant to me:
- I have now told you one story in word and song from my own experience of the Lord’s friendship and,
Lord. Why do I tell you these stories? My fervent hope is that they may help you understand, if you do not
already, that an intimate, personal relationship with God is not just some otherworldly illusion. Christianity, and
Biblical Judaism for that matter, are not at their core simply a collection of do’s and don’ts, an assortment of
religious duties and ceremonies. If I believed this to be the case, as once I surely did, I would not be a Christian
today!
- At its very essence, the Bible is the revelation of a God who is alive and well, a Divine Being who is not a
Creator who loves human beings and desires to be loved by them in return, a Heavenly Friend who desires to
have friends right here on Earth. He is as the book of Proverbs states “a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”
(Proverbs 18:24)
- I did not always believe these things. I was raised by parents who loved both God and their children very
God for themselves. I went to church and to Sunday school, especially since my father was a minister, but I
developed a pretty strong distaste for religion, through no fault of my parents whom I respected very much. I fell
in love with books as a young child, reading perhaps 500 to 700 pages a week during the summer of my 6th
year, and then reading the unabridged Moby Dick by the time I was seven. Later, as a young teenager, I read
the writings of any philosopher I could get my hands on, reveling in the turn of a phrase or some clever idea. I
was so much into philosophy that one of my social studies teacher’s, Mr. Brown, called me “his favorite little
philosopher.” I took delight in a good argument, especially when answering those people who really thought they
knew who God was—and especially if they had the audacity to claim that they knew Him personally!
- I remember responding to some believers my age who were trying to persuade me that God knew the
without knowing the future—since the future did not exist yet! Not that I cared much back then about God or
what He thought! God may have been very real to my parents, but He was quite obscure to me, not much more
than an intellectual curiosity. I was also terribly self-righteous and quite short-tempered, though my friends didn’t
dare tell me how nasty I had been until after I changed. The Lord has His ways, however, of getting through to
us. In the Old Testament, Job’s young friend, Elihu, responded to Job’s self-righteous declarations by saying,
“But I tell you, in this you are not right, for God is greater than man. Why do you complain to him that he answers
none of man’s words? For God does speak—now one way, now another—though man may not perceive it.”
(Job 33:12-14) I certainly did not perceive it at first, but the Lord was speaking to my heart in various ways long
before I knew Him personally.
- I don’t know if any of you have had the privilege of reading C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. It is a marvelous
friendship with Christ. My heart leapt at a number of points in reading his account, responding--to use Lewis’
own words, “What! Have you felt that too? I always thought that I was the only one.” (Preface) God’s dealing
with human beings is often direct and personal, known at least initially only to the individual in question. We are
not therefore always aware of how many other lives around us He is working in, too.
- C.S. Lewis was a scholar, writer, and teacher who, like me, kept himself busy reading volume after
of famous English writers who were also believers. Like me, Lewis began to find a God he was not even looking
for! I quote from Surprised by Joy,
I was not a total parallel to Lewis in that I was never an atheist. But I definitely had more interest in the
intellectual search for God through philosophy than a desire to really find Him, let alone become like those
people who claimed to have a personal relationship with Him. A God who was too personal could interfere too
greatly with what I viewed then as my right to myself. Evidently, Lewis felt the same way, because he wrote,
I had surrounded my soul with many a barbed wire fence by the age of 12, and many a “No Trespassing” sign. I
wasn’t very happy. In fact, in the summer of that year, I stood in front of a mirror in North Carolina and cried out,
“God, why does life have to be such a hell?”—not that I expected anyone to answer.
- At least my life was my own—or so I thought. A “God” encapsulated in philosophical thought was a “God”
help, either! Lewis evidently had similar ideas, and wrote,
Thereafter, something very alarming happened to Lewis. He wrote, “Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the
atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity
of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. ‘Rum thing,’ he went on. ‘All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying
God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.’” Lewis was devastated by the comment. “To
understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man…If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest
of the toughs, were not—as I would still have put it—‘safe,’ where could I turn? Was there no escape?”
- This was one of those points I mentioned earlier at which my heart leapt when I first read Surprised by Joy
God was after us. That is not exactly a comfortable feeling when you don’t yet comprehend the nature or
motives of the Divine Being who is chasing you. The contest was also not exactly an equal one, especially in the
mind of a person who previously regarded himself as quite self-sufficient, thank you very much! But the Lord
caught C.S. Lewis and, in God’s kairos, His good and proper time, He also caught me. What happened next in
Lewis’ life has remarkable parallels to what happened in my own. Here are his words describing it:
- In the book of Revelation, chapter 3, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Here I am! I stand at the door and
heard that knock on the door of my heart when I was fourteen years old in an old converted barn in New
Hampshire, and then and there I received Christ as my personal Lord and Savior--and best friend. There was no
preacher present that day, but there was an overwhelming sense of God’s presence in that room. There was
also a deep conviction of my own sinfulness, and the marvelous release and joy that comes with knowing that
one’s sins are forgiven. As John the Baptist testified, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world.” (John 1:29) Like Lewis, I, the “man of snow, at long last” began to melt. I had decided six years earlier, at
the age of eight, that I would never cry again as long as I lived. And I didn’t—until the Lord gave me tears in the
summer of my fourteenth year. My life has never been the same since, and the Friendship that began that day is
something that I would not trade for anything this world can offer.
- We need friends! As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in Across the Plains, “So long as we are loved by
in us the desire to love and be loved though we can, if we so choose, bury those feelings deep under layers of
anger, or resentment, or pride, or fear. Nevertheless, it is in relationship to God and to the people He puts
around us that we find out most clearly who we are and why we are here.
- I can also tell you, as one who is a little older than you, that there are experiences we all go through in life
Friend in Heaven who knows and cares all about our troubles. In Matthew 11, Jesus said, “Do not be afraid of
those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body
in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of
your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid: you are worth more
than many sparrows.”
- These are extraordinary words, declaring that God is not the least bit like a clockmaker who wound up the
meeting of the Areopagus in Athens, God “is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have
our being,” though we may be totally ignorant of His presence. I told you that I would tell you a couple of stories
and here, briefly, is the second. None of you have been parents yet, but I can tell you that there are few things
in life that will ever touch a parent more deeply than to see their little child suffer. Through that kind of
experience, painful as it is, one may also catch a glimpse at least vicariously of the love of a Heavenly Father for
His troubled and wandering earthly children.
- A few years ago, when he was one, our son Matthew began to have difficulty walking. He would fall down
to notice that Matthew's right leg was bent inwards below the knee. Our pediatrician confirmed that something
serious was going on, and sent us to the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. After a CAT scan and
many other difficult tests, the doctors there confirmed that our little boy had an incurable disease where the lower
bone of the leg collapses in on itself, until the leg is useless. There were longitudinal voids in the marrow, and
the bending inwards of the leg that my wife first noticed was continuing. The disease was so rare that there was
no cure--and no treatment! We asked everyone we knew to pray for our son, including many friends here at
Sacred Heart. We even told the doctor that we had many people praying for our son. His response was that it
"can't hurt, because there is nothing that we can do."
- Several months later, I was sitting in the waiting room at HOSS during one of Matthew's medical
one of his legs behind him--badly curved. I prayed for that boy as I sat there, realizing that he had the same
disease as Matthew. I asked the Lord to spare our son from growing up with a leg like that, trying not to cry as
the boy and his father sat next to me. The next time we saw our doctor, however, he announced that he could
not explain it, but that the marrow in Matthew's leg was complete, and that the leg's curvature was reversing!
Matthew still could not walk normally, and they wanted to continue to monitor his condition.
- In April 1996, we were holding an open-air outreach on the Cross Campus green at Yale University,
speaking, a little boy ran by kicking a soccer ball. Someone tugged on my sleeve, pointing out that the little boy
was Matthew! Many of those students knew our son, and some had even babysat for him, so there were tears of
joy on many faces that afternoon. The little boy who could not walk, was running, and he hasn't stopped running
ever since! The doctor graciously told us later that our son was just fine and that we would not need his services
anymore. What a friend we have in Jesus!
- On the sheet of questions you have been given related to this talk, I quoted what Christ Himself stated are
commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your
neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:36-40.
- God only asks us to do what He has first done Himself. As the Apostle John wrote, “We love him, because
lives for the sake of others. The greatest consequence of God’s friendship for us is not some spectacular
martyrdom on our part or great deeds done on Heaven’s behalf, but that we be a friend to our Lord and to those
He puts around us in our daily life, wherever God chooses to place us. Almost 2,000 years ago, the Apostle
Thomas was sent to love the people of southern India and point them to the living God. Many there bear his
name even today, including one of my best friends and fellow singers from Yale, Dr. Prem Thomas. Dr. Thomas
is himself preparing to serve the Lord and people as a medical missionary. Mother Teresa recently completed
her calling to serve the unloved lepers of India through the power of Christ’s love for them. Adoniram Judson
was called to leave his native New England in 1815, and went to a faraway country where he was called to love
the people of dark and brutal Burma. There is no one in Burma today who does not know at least something of
what that man did for their country by the power of God’s love. I know this because I learned it through a
Burmese student I met when I used to help with Bible Studies at Princeton.
- If we will let Him so do, the Christ who was made broken bread for us will make us broken bread for others
workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore to send out workers into his harvest field.” If the source
of our love for others is only the limited capacity of our own hearts, we will soon run dry. But if we first come to
know the boundless fountain of God’s love for us, we will be connected to a boundless source of love for others.
In John 7, Jesus states, “If a man (or woman) is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me,
as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”
- I would like to close with a tune I wrote for the 133rd Psalm during a blessed summer in 1972, spent with
Times. He was writing an article about our experience as believers on Ivy League campuses at a time when such
things seemed quite unusual. One of those young men, Nathaniel C. Nash, would later go on to become a
foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Thank God that believers, Jewish and Christian, are not so rare
on these campuses today. In fact, I have been asked to speak next month at a gathering of several hundred
believing Christians from a variety of denominations who are students at Columbia University. I was asked to
speak at a similar gathering of about three hundred undergraduates at Yale just two years ago. The day before
that talk, one of those four young men from that dinner in 1972, the Times European economic correspondent
and one of my best friends, was killed in a plane crash in Bosnia. That young man helped me write this song
about the unity and love that grows among men and women wherever God’s love and friendship is allowed to
blossom:
- Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
That brethren dwell together in unity.
It is like the precious oil upon the head
That ran down upon the beard, even Aaron's beard,
That ran down to the skirts of his garments.
As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that falls on Zion's mountains,
For there the Lord commanded the blessing,
Even life forevermore. (Psalm 133)
- Copyright ©1998 Christopher N. White
(Message given at Junior/Senior Kairos Retreat, Convent of the Sacred Heart,
- NYC, March 12, 1998)
| Friendship With Jesus |
Grace to trust whate'er befalls me, grace to walk with Him alone. He who bids me now to follow in the the path where He doth lead Is the one who knows tomorrow, meeting every care and need. Grace that overcomes in suffer'ing, grace that strengthens me through pain, Grace that lifts me up when stumbling, grace that shines through clouds and rain. There's no trial can overwhelm me while I'm trusting in my Lord. Everlasting arms support me, and His Word's my shield and sword. Grace that breaks the chains that bind me, grace that bids me come and dine. Grace to bear the cross He gives me till the crown of life be mine. Oh what love that sent the Savior, t'was my sins for which He died. Oh what gracious heavenly favor calling me into His Bride. |
| "In reading Chesterson, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous." |
| "Christianity placed at the center what then seemed to me a transcendental Interference. If its picture were true then no sort of “treaty with reality” could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of one’s soul (nay there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a notice of No Admittance." |
| "I distinguished this philosophical 'God' very sharply (or so I said) from 'the God of popular religion.' There was, I explained, no possibility of being in personal relation with Him. For I thought He projected us as a dramatist projects his characters, and I could no more 'meet' Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. I didn’t call Him 'God' either; I called Him 'Spirit.'” |
| "The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice…Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable…I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein…I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt.” |