Friendship in a Lonely WorldSample

My best fortune was marrying Vera Mae and beginning to build a family together. Finally, life was good. I guess we had almost achieved the American dream. I had true friends, a family, a nice house, a good job, and people who respected me. . . but something was still missing. I was unsettled, but I didn’t know why. There was a deep, deep longing—a loneliness—in my heart that would not go away.

Our oldest son, Spencer, began going to Good News Club meetings, where he learned that the Bible taught that Jesus loves him. He would come home eager to share the stories he had learned with me. When he invited me to go, I was more excited than he could have ever known. And when I began reading the Bible for myself, from the very first pages I found the answer to that deep, deep longing, the loneliness that felt like a wide, empty chasm. I read about a God who would be a friend. For the very first time I read about a God who created everything: the earth, the sun, moon, stars, and every living creature. Then He created a man and a woman. Poet James Weldon Johnson imagines the scene. In “The Creation,” Johnson depicts God observing the grandeur of all that He had made. After a time, the Lord decided it wasn’t enough, that something was missing. He decided, “I’ll make me a man.”

So He did.

I love that picture of God, sitting and thinking about what He would do to fill His “loneliness,” to create a being that He could fellowship with, and finally deciding that He would make a man. It might not be theologically accurate, since God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—actually was complete in Himself. And to tell the truth, I’m pretty sure we were birthed out of the friendship of the Trinity. When God said in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,” He set things in motion.