No Friends in Life - But So Many at the Funeral
Yesterday, I waited outside of a funeral. Last week, an Italian friend of mine committed suicide. He was 42 years old. His name was Marcello.
Over the past 7 years, we spent a pretty good amount of time together. A year ago, Marcello opened a business in a sleepy town (and when I say sleepy in Italy — I mean Nyquil sleep). Inevitably, the business was dry by summer. Marcello was a more “outdoor” type of guy anyway and not a shop-keeper. Marcello was a fantastic photographer by trade. In fact, he took the picture on the front of our prayer card and helped us design the card. His name is on the back.
While designing our prayer cards, Marcello began to confess the depths of his depression to me. We’d go to dinner. He’d come to our bookstore. We’d get coffee together. He’d come by my office. Again & again, I shared God’s simple plan. I remember one time taking about 30 minutes with him using “The Bridge” flip-chart to show him that there truly was Good News. Every time my friend Roberto and I would spend time with him, we would pray with him, encourage him, and show him the unrelenting love of God.
What really weighs on me is that we may have been the only Bible-teaching-living men that he ever knew. The more I look through the people in his life, the more I believe this could be true.
One of the chief characteristics of depression is isolation or the feeling of abandonment. Marcello would regularly share with me that he had no real friends in this world. In so many ways, he was right.
As Roberto & I stood outside in 30 degree weather in the city courtyard, they brought Marcello’s casket out and placed it in the hearse. Following behind the casket were his wife and 4-500 of his “friends.” So many of them made comments like, “It’s very sad, but he had really changed this last year…and his anti-depressents didn’t help… just let him go and rest in peace.” Say what they will, but I was left pondering the meaning of true friendship as the sharply dressed mass of people came out.
There in the courtyard, the eternal words of Jesus came to my heart, “Greater love has no man than this - that a man would lay his life down for his friend.” Jesus identified Himself by ardent, unrelenting, and true friendship.
The Song of Songs 8:6 says, “Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death; ardent love is as unrelenting as Sheol. Love’s flames are fiery flames; the fiercest of all.”
What we call friendship today doesn’t have the biblical depth of what I see in these verses. We get the distinct sense that friendship was measured by the weights of life & death in the Bible. In Marcello’s case, I’ve been riddled with the thought that as he drew closer to death, one true friendship could have stepped in and been life for him. If one had done that, they might have enabled Marcello to be with us today.
If only 1 of us 500 had…
Jesus was dead-set on friendships.
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