I have a friend named Theresa. I met her when I was just 20 years old, and we became very close very fast. We were polar opposites in many ways…she is dark-haired, dark-eyed, petite and lovely, and I am light-haired and light-skinned, and my eyes are blue, blue, blue. She was strong in voicing her opinion and I was quiet, hesitant, and shy. She was worldly, street-wise, and tough. I was naïve, innocent, and fresh from the farm. But we were like peas in a pod despite our obvious differences. We loved being together. We were two puzzle pieces that linked with one another to form a perfect fit. She taught me how to find my way in the world and how to my drink coffee black, no sugar, no milk. I taught her how to correctly answer the Biblical category questions on television game shows and gave her my love. She was smart. She made me laugh. I had to work hard just to keep up with her. How I admired her. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

She was an atheist.

And I was a Christian.

During the course of my friendship with Theresa, many of the things I had always believed were true began to unravel as I experienced life more fully. As heartache and hardship began to weave a pattern of despair into the web of my life, I started losing faith in the God I had been raised to believe in. Theresa influenced me frequently to reconsider my belief system, encouraging me to simply discard it. She always hailed the intellect as being superior to any religious affiliation or system of belief. Finding myself incapable of proving to her that anything I had been taught as a child was indeed true, I finally succumbed to her persuasions and eventually turned away from God entirely. This marked the beginning of the darkest period of my life. I began to come apart at the seams and, fractured and broken, I sought relief from my pain in ways that shame me to remember.

Eventually my relationship with Theresa began to suffer as well. Believe it or not, it had nothing to do with our religious differences because by then there essentially were none. It had to do with her fear of losing me and the friendship we had built together. Her fear that I might turn away from her caused her to hold on too tightly. And eventually that fear became a reality. This is how fear makes itself manifest: Whatever we fear the most will come to pass if we submerge ourselves deeply enough into its oppression. I eventually told her that I found our differences to be too great and that I needed to find my way on my own. This was devastating to her and she asked me repeatedly not to follow through with my decision. In spite of her obvious distress, I felt I was doing the right thing so I turned a deaf ear to her pleading.

My heart did not agree with my decision and began to mourn her loss from the first moment I told her good-bye. I dreamed of her almost nightly and would awaken feeling sick with sorrow because I longed so desperately to be close to her again. She was my friend and I had turned my back on her. I would catch glimpses of her everywhere, see her face in a crowd, smell the scent of her as it drifted by me, hear her voice or her laughter somewhere off in the distance. It was never really her, just my imagination playing havoc with my mind. In spite of how much I missed her, I still believed I was doing the right thing and remained firm in my decision.

Theresa would periodically write to me, sending me cards now and then. Every time I heard from her, I would be nearly driven to my knees with the yearning I felt to renew our friendship, but I was afraid to reach out to her. I believed that my actions had carved a fissure, an abyss, so deep into the foundation of our friendship that it could never be mended back together again or made whole. I kept firmly convincing myself that keeping myself separate from her was the only thing I could do.

Not too long ago, she sent a card to my mother, asking that it be forwarded to me because she wasn’t sure if I still lived at my old address. She put her e-mail address in the card, as she often did, and this time my heart insisted that I not ignore her any longer. I gathered my courage together and wrote to her. Her response was so filled with gratitude that I was ashamed that I had made her wait so long for what we both had been longing for. We started emailing regularly. She wanted to meet for lunch right away, but I wasn’t ready. We kept writing. Finally I told her I wanted to see her. We made arrangements to meet for breakfast at a nearby café. I got there early and sat outside waiting for her. After a few minutes, I heard her unforgettable voice behind me say, “After all these years and you still sit the same way.” I got up and turned to greet her and, as I held her in my arms, she began to cry. I have never known her to be the kind of person to cry easily. She kept thanking me over and over for meeting her and for being her friend again. What had I done? Why had I made her suffer so? For what purpose had I created a rift between us and then worked so diligently to keep wide the gap? We sat in that restaurant for five hours and never stopped talking. It was as if nothing had changed, as if no time had passed between this meeting and the last except that now we had new stories to share. As we talked, I experienced the actual healing of my heart and felt the hole that had been left in it by her absence close up again. She told me that day she would be moving within a month to another state and I was shocked and saddened. Why had I waited so long? My fear had cost me dearly. We made arrangements to see each other as often as we could before she had to leave.

Even though we had been apart from each other for so long, she already knew much of the heartache I had endured while she was away from me…she spoke it to me before I could even say it out loud. She said that somehow she just knew. She was so angry that she had been unable to protect me, saying she would have taken me out of the situation even without my permission had she been in my life when the harm was being done. She could not bear the thought that someone had hurt me and she had been helpless to defend me.

She has repeatedly told me how sorry she is that she led me down a darkened path. I have tried so many times to reassure her that what she did was give me a gift. It took me to a place I needed to go and, while it was treacherous and fraught with peril, I have never regretted what I learned while traveling there. I am grateful to my friend who had enough courage to show me a different way and thus gave me the very tools I required for what was lying in wait on the road up ahead.

Our friendship remains strong. She still grapples with her own spirituality and challenges me frequently concerning mine. We shared a series of e-mails recently that was exhilarating! I am sure my hair was on fire and my eyes were burning like twin flames that day while I sat writing to her. How worthy she is of my respect and admiration. I love her dearly. Everything she is is everything I want her to be. Nothing more, nothing less.

It is in the exploration of the unlikely and the uncommon that we find ourselves experiencing the adventure of a lifetime. If we only seek out that which is familiar to us, we keep ourselves confined to our own comfort zones and, in so doing, fail to embrace all that life yearns to give us and bring us to know. Are you aware? Your enemy is your brother. Tear down the walls and remove the boundary markers that would disallow those who are unlike you to come near. Beckon to you the unloved, the forgotten, the misunderstood, the uncared for...even the unkind. In the giving of your love to those who do not deserve it, they become transformed -- for Love is the Great Redeemer -- and you, in turn, are enlarged and renewed and made whole in ways you never even dreamed of.

Let them come.

"Jesus didn't say to love those who think as we do, or to love those we trust, or to love those who love us. He said to love one another even as he has loved us. His love is the most honest, pure, and unconditional love we can know. He loves the murderer, the rapist, the thief, the liar, and yes, the abortionist, the same as he loves you or me. He loves the sick, the weak, the lost, and the ignorant as he does the healthy, the strong, the saved, and the learned." - Betty J. Eadie, The Ripple Effect, page 43