OLDIE BUT NOT MOLDY

Several years after our parents died, my sister brought me my dad’s old Bible, which she had stored away and thought I should now have. She had kept a lot of family “heritage” things as I was still single at the time of their deaths, and moving a lot. Now that I was married and "settled," she felt I should have our father’s old leather-bound Bible. As I leafed through it, noting portions he had marked, I was grateful again for a Christian dad. But now this old Bible had a strong, stale odor from storage. The best I knew to do was seal it in a plastic bag and put it in a bin with other family “heritage” things that had interest but not regular usefulness for me.

Some day my family will have to decide what to do with that plus my Bibles in various versions. My current one, a quarter-century worn and marked up, wouldn’t win any beauty contests. But when I open it, it is my old friend who leads me to the throne room where my Savior waits to chat with me.

I thought of such aging and antique Bibles when I saw this sign:

My most valued antiques are my old friends.

One such human “antique” called the other night. Our friendship goes back more than three decades, with part of that time her living on the other side of the nation. She’s now back in my town, but often on the go helping her adult children and grandchildren in another state. 

It’s not the usual “girlfriend” relationship that’s stereotyped by coffee dates or shopping trips. But it's been built by years of personal contract, and now safe enough that she entrusted me with a key to her house in case she ever locked herself out. (That has happened with her on-the-go life). If there’s a big family concern, she knows I will pray, and vice versa. We share articles of interest to each other—the observation of Proverbs 27:17: “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” One time she remarked, “We’re friends who can just pick up and keep going where we left off.” We’re low-maintenance in our friendship, but stay in touch enough to know we’ll always be there for each other. I’m reminded of Proverbs 17:24 (and I change the last word to “sister”): “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”

One person I pray for has few up-close-and-personal friends like this. Oh, this person is on social media, but that's not the same as face-to-face contact (and hard work) of truly nurturing a friend. You can't hug a screen. While contemporary media can encourage “sharing,” it also enables the faceless "out" of “unfriending” someone. It doesn’t nurture the honesty and loving admonition that comes from just being together--particularly the believer-to-believer friendships that can grow deep and sweet with time.

And isn't that also true of spending time with our Truest Friend, Jesus?