The Friend From Church Who Meant Well

It was in a car park after a service, which is where most of the important conversations in that man's life have happened.

His friend was not selling him anything. That is what makes this so difficult to put down. His friend was excited, and he was in it himself, and he had put his own money in first, which he mentioned, and which was true.

They had known each other eleven years. Their wives cook together. Their boys were in the same year.

So the savings went in. Not everything. Enough that it mattered. The kind of amount that had taken a long time to become an amount, put together in a currency of small decisions across about six years.

It came apart slowly, which is worse than quickly. There was a good period. Then there was a period of explanations, then a period of shorter explanations, then a very long silence, and then the thing where you look it up online at eleven at night and find a page that tells you what you already know.

And here is where he has lived for two years. He cannot decide who to be angry with.

If he is angry with his friend, then eleven years and two families and a lot of Sunday afternoons become a story about a man who cost him his savings, and he does not want that story and he does not think it is true.

If he is angry with himself, then he is a man who put his family's money into something because somebody he liked was excited about it, and that is a thing he cannot say out loud in his own kitchen.

So he does neither, out loud, and quietly does both, all the time, in a loop that never lands anywhere.

You know that car park. Yours might be a brother in law, or somebody at work, or a person from your old church. And the loop is the same: it cannot resolve, because resolving it means somebody has to be the villain and neither candidate fits.

Come and sit outside where the coffee is. There is a promise God made twice in the same breath, and it goes somewhere different from blame.

There is no code, and there is a promise about shame

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to hand a man in your position another one.

There is no code. There was nothing in that scheme, and no amount of diligence in a car park after a service was going to reveal what took eighteen months and a court to reveal.

And here is the thing I will not do. I am not going to solve your loop by telling you your friend was a fraud. I do not know that, and neither do you, and I am not going to build your peace on a verdict about a man whose wife cooks with your wife. Relief made that way is not relief. It just relocates the wound into a friendship.

Here is the promise, and notice that it does not mention blame at all.

And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed.Joel 2:26

Now, that is spoken to a people who had lost everything to locusts. And a locust year is exactly the kind of loss that has no villain in it. Nobody defrauded them. There was nothing to litigate. It was simply gone, and there was nowhere to put the anger, which is precisely your situation with a different set of facts.

And what God says to people with nowhere to put it is not a ruling about fault. He says: my people shall never be ashamed. He says it at the end of that verse and He says it again in the very next one, twice in two breaths, because He knows exactly what a loss like that leaves behind, and what it leaves behind is not confusion about blame. It is shame.

You are not required to settle who is at fault before you are allowed to be free of this. That is not a comfort I have arranged in a courtyard. It is written into Joel 2, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a promise made to people ruined by insects and lays it on a man who cannot decide who to be angry with.

You have a promise that stands over a loss with no villain in it, and God has never once made your release conditional on a verdict. Scripture says my people shall never be ashamed, twice, and His Spirit is the one who takes a repetition like that and makes it land where the loop has been running.

Now let me say the true thing, because we are outside and the coffee is bad and nobody is listening.

The loop is not really about your friend. It is a way of not looking at the one sentence that would actually hurt, which is this: I made a decision about my family's money in a car park because I trusted somebody, and it cost us.

That sentence is unbearable, so you have kept it moving. As long as the question is who is to blame, the sentence never has to stand still long enough to be looked at.

And when you do look at it, here is what is in it. Trusting a friend of eleven years is not a defect. It is how a life is meant to work. The alternative to being the kind of man who trusts his friends is a life nobody would want and you would not last a year in it.

You are not a fool for having trusted, and the capacity that cost you is the same capacity that has built everything good in your life. Scripture says love thinketh no evil, and it says it as a description of the highest thing there is rather than as a warning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man hear that about himself in a car park two years later.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a loop that has run for two years does not stop because a friend was warm to you over coffee. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what going round again never does. So speak, out loud, on your own. You have the standing to speak to a loop and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by judgement, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a courtyard.