Thirty-Six Days Later :: part two

Continued from last post...

But there we were, nevertheless, standing in our dingy kitchen five thousand miles from home yelling at each other over Lord knows what. He wouldn’t shut up. I wouldn’t open up. For months it had been that way, our friendship slowly disintegrating because I didn’t know how to communicate, and it seemed to me he didn’t know how to stop communicating.

I didn’t want accountability. I didn’t want depth. I didn’t want to talk about my day or my life or much of anything really. And simply because I was being pushed in that direction, I refused to go. I guess I just didn’t see the value of it at the time. Besides - it was easier to hide in silence. I wanted easy believability, not the sparks and noise and pain of iron on iron. For these reasons, our relationship had slowly devolved of the course of several months from buddy-buddy, to civil tolerance, to silent misery. Silent misery eventually erupted, volcanic and volatile.

I’d never heard my friend curse before. We were Christians, for Christ’s sake.

And so there we stood, fists balled, faces red, veins popping. The refugee tilework on the floor took on a red tinge as head-pounding anger nearly blocked out all rational thought in my brain. I remember yelling something to the effect of “Why the hell do you keep pushing me? Why won’t you get off my friggin’ back?!” His response was somehow both perfectly simple and exceedingly profound at the same time.

His response was a moment of clarity.

“Because I care more about your holiness than about your friendship.”

I had little insight as to what those words meant at the time, only that in my anger they initially struck me as a stupid, arrogant thing to say. What did he know about holiness, anyway?

But I couldn’t shake the implications of his words.

“Because I care more about your holiness than about your friendship.”

[ part 3 ]