A Chance to Role-Play

A few years back, when I was lonely, I took it into my head to try to be friends with a woman I’d known for some years, with whom I thought I had a lot in common. Being young and desperate, it took me a while to figure out that we had almost nothing in common, and that she just wasn’t interested in being friends. Since she was known for being blunt, sometimes to the point of rudeness, it also took me a good long while to realize that she hadn’t been straightforward with me; she’d been for some time resentful that I was taking so much of her time, but hadn’t said so.

I retreated, and left her alone, and that was that until about a year ago, when I opened my mail to find a letter from her (I’ll call her "X") in which she blamed me and my friendship attempt for severe pain that she’d felt. At the time, I handled it well, and didn’t accept the responsibility for her pain … I thought.

Recently that junk reared its ugly head. The Lord told me it had nothing to do with me—"X" had problems of her own that far preceded me—but although I was mentally willing and able to accept that as fact, it had no impact on how I felt. I still felt guilty. That’s when the Lord stepped in to do His thing.

A few months ago, I was befriended by a woman who had a fair bit of time on her hands. We busily exchanged emails and phone calls … and then I was finding that I wasn’t writing much, otherwise. And I became busier with work. And there were one or two little quirks in our relating to each other with which I wasn’t comfortable.

So do I tell her I don’t have much time to devote to this friendship right now? Do I mention the things I’m not comfortable with? Do I risk hurting her feelings? Or do I sweep it under the carpet and hope everything works out and attempt to ignore my increasing dissatisfaction?

I knew what I had to do—I’ve come far enough that it wasn’t really much of a choice—but in the middle of that, the Lord turned the light on, and I saw it: I was right smack dab in the middle of a situation that was, in all essential points, exactly the same as the situation I’d been in with "X." The only difference was that this time, I was in "X’s" place. You see, I’d only half believed the Lord when He’d told me that the stuff "X" had blamed me for wasn’t my fault; now the Lord had put in front of me the exact same choices He’d put in front of her.

I chose to take the risk of being honest, so I know "X" could have made that choice, too.

Now I really know: it wasn’t my fault.

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