When You’re The Friend In Need

I lay in bed with a pounding sinus infection, the day before an 18-hr international flight.

My doorbell rang.

My newish friend Millie had brought me samgyetang, a nourishing Korean soup of chicken, jujube, and ginseng. We weren’t close enough for her to bring me soup, but she had. We weren’t close enough for her to boil water, pour it into a bowl, and hold my face over it as she draped my head with a hand towel, commanding that I breathe in to clear my sinuses, but she did.

So I ate samgyetang. I breathed steam.

To speak the Love Languages language, neither Acts of Service nor Gift Giving comes naturally to me. I’d always been a sort of accidental gnostic; mind > matter, essence > substance. I’m a words girl. A time girl. Affirmation, ideas, mutual self-disclosure, and quality time are my jam.

Tell me, crying, about the fight you just had with your dad, or that you’ve secretly always wanted to try shrooms, or how, lately, you’ve been questioning everything about church. Tell me the good exciting stuff too, I will absolutely be your hype girl re: your job hunt, the book you’re writing, a new donut shop opening by your apartment. And then let’s go to the donut shop together and talk some more.

We can talk about Dostoevsky or Mindy Kaling or your new Match.com Match that might turn out to be maybe ok. We can talk about your childhood trauma and my favorite episode of New Girl, we can talk about women in ministry or technology taking over the world or we can just drive down the road without talking for a while, watching the fields flash past.

To me, this was closeness.

But Millie’s way of loving was so physical. Her love felt like the press of her couch on your cheek; she was watching your kids so that you could get a nap. Millie’s love tasted like chicken soup, it felt like the swirl of steam in your plugged-up sinuses.

Millie was busy, practical, a problem solver. The moment she entered my life she bought me the right kind of trash bin to comply with my new neighborhood’s Byzantine waste disposal policies. She washed my dishes every time she came over. She constantly fed me and many others (living on a fundraised missionary budget, how did she keep her fridge and pantry so full?)

I often felt indebted to Millie.

I did not like this feeling, Sam I am.

Americans want to be independent, don’t we? And, when not Lone Wolfing it, we want to be the Meal Train organizer, not the one asking for meals. It feels like, in this culture, to be the helper means you’re strong. To be the helped means you’re weak. Asking for help is all raw and squishy. It’s an open wound bleeding right out in public. So we hide, and lie, and keep going it alone.

No wonder we are lonely. Vulnerability, honesty, interdependence: isn’t this the very stuff of relational richness?

The pandemic didn’t help, obviously. Just before it started, loneliness had been declared an epidemic. Then, to varying degrees depending on political affiliation, age, career, or location, we isolated into deeper loneliness.

In Seoul, where I lived at the time, physical gathering ended for nearly two years, nearly completely. Church couldn’t meet in person for a long time. Social meetups, for the bulk of 2020-2022, were legally limited to four people. So, doing a quick headcount, that’s…me, my husband, and our kids, the end. That was my social group.

To make it worse, as I watched from a distance in horror, my people back home were tearing each other apart. It’s really something to observe your own country from afar, translated mostly through headlines and social media.

“We are all having such a hard time already,” I thought after watching another brutal Facebook fight end the friendship of people I loved. “Why can’t we all just take care of each other?”

By then, I wouldn’t have minded feeling indebted. A soupcon of soup would have been lovely.

In November Covid came to our house, despite all our precautions, right at the time of year I always felt homesick for Thanksgiving back at my parents’. I took the virus hard, burning up and shivering, wracked with cough, pierced with that fever ache that screams in every vertebrae and pulses at the skull’s base.

I couldn’t move. I certainly couldn’t make dinner. Millie would have been the first to send food, but she had moved out of the country.

So I sent our Bible study an SOS.

My husband and I had been leading a Bible study online. Most of us had never even met in person, as many had arrived in Korea after the regulations took effect. We were a random bunch: some married couples, some young English teachers, a TV celebrity, a software engineer, a K-pop manager, a fitness trainer come-Young-Life-Leader.

Despite having never shared the same physical space, we truly cared for each other. It’s crazy what bonding is possible when you desperately need it.

As leaders, maybe we were supposed to be the strong ones. But we were drowning.

Still, it felt like a big deal to text one of our Bible study buddies, “Could you spread the word and maybe…get the group to help us out with dinners? It’s so hard to ask, but I’m quarantined in my room, and we are having a really hard time getting fed.”

Say no more. These brothers and sisters responded with the reckless abundance of God himself. Homemade meals arrived at our doorstep, one after another. Take-out containers heaped up in our fridge.

One family sent a package with not only snacks, but little activities and toys for our homebound, bored kids. Another couple sent us pumpkin pie – impossible to find in Seoul – so we could have a quarantine Thanksgiving. We actually ended up asking people to stop sending food, because we’d run out of space to store it!

Here it was again: food as friendship. Love made tangible, love with flavor, texture, and nutrition for our needy bodies. Here was a vulnerability expressed not in word but in physical, animal need. Like Adam and Eve naked and unashamed before the fall, we were hungry, and unembarrassed, and fed.

Jesus was not embarrassed by His physical needs. Born into a human body, God the Son felt thirst, hunger, weariness, and pain. He’d barely made it out of the womb before he needed rescue from Herod’s threat of murder, a physical danger. Jesus needed his parents’ safeguarding, and they showed up, dashing him down to Egypt and out of harm’s way.

Jesus’s willing dependance on others to meet his human needs didn’t stop there. At the river Jordan, He asks his cousin to physically lower him into the water and lift him up. Later, Jesus asked his disciples to get him to the other side of the lake when, come to find out, he could have just walked across. But instead, “as they sailed, he slept.” At a well, Jesus asked a woman to give him a drink.

How often we see Him slipping away to get some rest. How often the scandals around Him involve meals – who He eats with, when He eats, whether or not everybody washed their hands, etc. These incidents speak to a physical body with immeasurable spiritual significance.

Other times, Jesus emphasized the importance of bodies by miraculously meeting physical need. He touched leprous skin. He healed unseeing eyes and unleaping limbs. He filled thousands of growling bellies with bread and fish. He brought the party to the next level with the best wine ever, met grief and doubt with breakfast, and gave his actual back for the whipping we deserved.

On every one of these occasions, Jesus is more than physical, but He is not less than physical. He models relationships soundly anchored in heart, mind, and body. We are made to be inextricably integrated beings, the feelings and thoughts and skin and bones of us woven together. Why not make room for physical need in our friendships? It is incredibly dignifying to give another person the gift of our own insufficiency. A request, a favor, a need expressed, are signifiers that I trust you enough to tear down my sturdy old façade of self-sufficiency.

Some days are more than one can bear – alone. God allows this. He will not suffer his child to continue in an idolatry of independence or mistaken pride that destroys the body and the soul. Our unbearable needs are meant to drive us back into each other’s arms.

I am permanently changed by the way Millie loved me when I was a stranger, and the way our church loved me when I was sick. Now, back in the States, new all over again, I want to build the kind of community where we meet each other’s needs.

God does send us more than we can handle, to drive us into dependance on Him, which mostly looks like dependance on each other.

So even though there’s great pressure right now to put my best foot forward so that people think I’m 100% awesome, I want to form friendships where we take care of failing bodies as well as hearts.

I want the kind of closeness where you thrust your sleeping infant into my arms so that you can grab a shower and some lunch. And I want to hear about that fight you had with your dad. I want to nerd out about Dostoevsky with you but I also want to take out your trash when you’re recovering from hernia surgery. I want to text you wailing, “Can I borrow your jacket nothing in my closet looks good n the interview is in tomorrowwww!” I want whichever of us isn’t crying to give the other one a hug (or a tissue, I know we’re not all touchers.)

Maybe I even want the kind of friendship where your rent got too high, and we do have that extra room in our house, so...I don’t know. I’m still new to this.

Let’s just take it one bowl of samgyetang at a time.