I love the show Friends.
I wasn’t allowed to watch it when it first started showing on TV (in high school), but caught up with it in college and just after. I soon made up for lost time by gradually purchasing each full season as it came out on DVD.
That’s right. I own all ten seasons. (Look, all you people who grew up with Netflix, this was all we had. If you wanted to binge watch a show, you had to do it the old-fashioned way. Hardcore, baby.)
Even after the show ended (sniff), I watched them constantly. I moved from one episode to the next, season by season, until I got to the last one. Then I’d start all over. I’d just have it on in the background while I was making dinner or folding laundry.
Needless to say, I KNOW Friends. So when my teenage daughter and her friends walk around singing ‘Smelly Cat,’ I just shake my head. They don’t know them like I know them.
Friends perfectly depicted an interesting phenomenon that was happening in (but not limited to) the nineties. Psychologists called it ‘pseudo-families’ (also seen in Seinfeld and other shows).
There were no smart phones. There was no social media. But the need to connect with other human beings transcends time and technology.
So the idea is that groups of adults would band together and completely share their lives, creating family-type environments, pseudo-families.
One of my favorite Friends episodes is when Rachel/Monica and Joey/Chandler (who lived across the hall from each other) had a competition over who knew the other roommates best.
Ross created a trivia game about all of them (which I guess means HE actually knew them all the best) and they played to prove who was more fully known. (The guys won on a technicality, because in the early seasons nobody ever really knew what Chandler did for a living.)
But there was something touching about Joey knowing that Monica’s biggest pet peeve is animals dressed as humans and Monica knowing exactly how Chandler’s name was misspelled on a magazine subscription.
And I think it’s that they were fully known.
I talk a lot about being real with people, being vulnerable, pushing past our fears to show each other our true selves. But the truth is, deep down, we all want to be known that well. And still loved.
I have a friend who is friends with her therapist. As in, they hang out outside of the office. They go on double dates with their husbands and go over to each other’s houses to hang out. It’s an interesting dynamic.
My friend was telling me something the other day that her therapist-friend said while they were all out to dinner one night. I just shook my head and cringed a little bit.
“What?” she said, looking confused.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Isn’t it weird that she knows everything there is to know about you…”
She nodded emphatically, “EVERYTHING.”
“…and you guys still hang out as friends?”
Her face relaxed into a content smile. “Do you know how awesome it is for someone to know your deepest darkest secrets, the worst of the worst about you, and STILL want to be friends with you?”
Wow. Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty awesome.
The truth is, we’re all starving for that kind of connection. But we don’t trust it. We’ve all had our vulnerabilities used against us and have been betrayed and humiliated by our exposed weaknesses. Many of us have sworn to never put ourselves back in that situation.
Others have never trusted it to begin with, have never even RISKED being hurt because they understood the disastrous potential on the front end.
So we hide behind our masks and our small talk and our fine-how-are-yous. It’s a level of politeness that we all deem acceptable and safe. And if you want to go any deeper than that with someone, well, may the Force be with you.
I’m a pretty open book, as many of you know. (Hello. I rat myself out on this blog on a weekly basis.) I don’t have many secrets and the secrets I do have are known by the right people. And they love me anyway.
I don’t know that it’s particularly brave as much as it is just lazy. It’s just too exhausting to keep up fronts, pretend everything is perfect or even attempt to imply that I’ve got it all together. I just don’t have that kind of energy lying around.
Before Brad and I had officially met, we talked on the phone for several weeks. In one of our first conversations, when it was evident that a connection was definitely possible, we did something kinda crazy.
Brad said, “You know, this is gonna be a serious pain if we do this. You in Ocala. Me in Orlando.”
I agreed. He took a deep breath and continued, “What do you say we just spill it? Tell each other all our crap and see if we can live with it before we waste any time or gas trying to make this work?”
Not terribly romantic, but wonderfully practical for a single working mom who was not interested in playing the game anymore. “I’m in,” I told him. What did I have to lose?
So we took the next couple hours telling our stories to each other, mostly the circumstances surrounding our respective divorces, kids, etc. And when we finished, we were both still on the line and we were both okay with what we had heard. So we kept talking.
And we’re still talking.
But I admit, there a couple cards I keep close to the vest. Those are the Big Ones, the Doozies. And not everybody gets to know them (Brad, my therapist, my former therapist in Ocala and a couple close friends). And I think that’s okay.
They are moments of serious transgression and dark sin that have been redeemed into jewels by my Savior. He died for those sins (thank You, Lord), I am (finally) free from the guilt and I hold them tightly to my heart.
When the right moment comes, in a one-on-one situation where the other person is being destroyed by shame of a similar nature, I will offer them one of these gems and whisper the sacred, “Me too.”
I’ve seen relief flood faces that have been twisted in pain for months, years, even decades. Suddenly, there is hope where there was none. There is acceptance where there was fear. And there is love where it was seemingly undeserved.
And it is a tiny, imperfect glimpse of the unconditional love offered to us by our Father.
Now God doesn’t have any shared sin to commiserate with us over, but He knows it. All of it. And He loves us anyway.
I don’t get it either. But I believe it. I have to.
Psalm 139 says:
You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue You, Lord, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before, and You lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to You; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to You.
For you created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be.
Hold up. He knows my THOUGHTS? Oh crap. He knows my words before I say them? He knows what I’m going to do before I do it? He knows what this day in front of me holds, and all the days after that?
And He still loves me?
That’s way past Brad, my therapists and my friends. My thoughts, you guys. They’re not pretty. I mean, it’s pretty dark in here.
Jesus is not horrified by my darkness. He died for it. He wiped it from my record. The sins I have yet to commit have been already paid for. By His very life. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:9-10)
Knowing me, loving me and dying for me? As unbelievable and ridiculous as that is, I accept it. It’s my only hope of salvation.
But what might be even more humbling is not just that He knows me and loves me anyway. It’s that He LIKES me.
He DELIGHTS in me. Wants to be with me. Knows the worst of the worst and still wants to be my Friend.
Pretty awesome, right?
Being vulnerable with other people is terrifying. That’s why we’re supposed to start with God.
Start with the One who knows more than you can ever tell Him, more than you even know yourself. And still pours out His love and like and acceptance and favor on your life. Once we start to get our heads around that, sharing our hearts with finite little humans is much less intimidating.
God isn’t like the friends across the hall who know a lot about me and could win at any trivia game about my life. God created the game.
I am known. All of it. Even the Doozies. He knows. He saw them before they happened. And decided in all that foreknowledge to love me anyway and nothing will ever change that.
He isn’t turned off by repulsive thoughts. He isn’t weary of my constant screw ups. His love doesn’t have a limit I can ever reach. I could never out-sin His love.
These truths are beginning to sink in. Down to the deep parts where the darkness hides. And the light of His love is starting to light up my soul.
I am completely 100% known. And He loves me anyway.
Awesome.
