MESSAGE FROM PETE
October 2007

FROM THE METROPOLIS YOUTH & FAMILY MINISTRIES OFFICE

When Friends Let Us Down

By Pete Sotiras, Director

Another season of The Hills has begun.  For those of you who haven’t watched it before, the show is about a young woman named Lauren and her friends who live in LA.  One of the big issues facing Lauren is the loss of her former best friend Heidi.  During the first two seasons, the two were inseparable.  What once was a solid friendship has now been shattered.  Why?  How?  Basically, Lauren was not a fan of Heidi’s boyfriend, Spencer, because Spencer wasn’t the greatest guy to Heidi when they started dating.  The final blow to the friendship came when Lauren assumed that Heidi started awful rumors about her (even though there’s no evidence).  So, Lauren decided that she didn’t want Heidi’s friendship. 

It seems to me that Lauren let Heidi down and also hurt Heidi through her actions.  Lauren accused her best friend of something she didn’t know was true and abandoned Heidi because of her boyfriend.  Some of you may have been hurt by a friend or not supported by a friend.  Let me tell you something people--the devil’s job is to divide and destroy.  His objective is for everyone to be separated from God and from each other.  He’s done it with Lauren and Heidi and he may have done it to you with your friends.

It’s the Church’s job to give us guidance and to help us understand what to do in situations where our friendships are tested.  During the Divine Liturgy and during our own reading of the Gospels, we are reminded that Jesus Himself experienced tension in His friendships.  His own disciples, the people He called friends, abandoned Him at the moment He needed them the most.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to read the passages in the Bible where the disciples “forsook Him and fled” (Matt. 26:56).  Or how about when Peter denied the Lord three times when someone asked him who Jesus was (Matt. 27:75)?  This is the same Peter who Jesus saved when he was sinking (Matt. 14:22-33) and whose wife’s mother he healed (Luke 4;38-39).  All the disciples were healed, helped and befriended by our Lord, and they all let Him down somehow.  Yet, the Lord still loved them.  Even after they ran, Jesus never stopped believing in them.

We too, in our own ways, have let Jesus down.  But just like he gave the disciples a chance 2,000 years ago, he never gives up on us as well.  Now, we as Orthodox Christians need to do the same for those friends of ours who have let us down.  We need to pray that they will ‘come to their senses” and be our friends once more.  We must not give up on them, even if they have abandoned us or hurt us in some way.  Friends gossip, or hurt us, or abandon us because they have lost sense of who they are—by not giving up on them, by witnessing Christ’s light to them through our actions, there may be a chance that our friendships may be healed and restored.

[Youth and their families can contact Pete at: sfyouth@sanfran.goarch.org.  You can also view and download this article from the Metropolis Youth webpage at: http://www.youth.sanfran.goarch.org/]