Advice

Here's the thing. I'm no Doctor Phil. But when someone needs me, I listen.


So. When my friend needed me, and I'm telling you...he needed me...I listened, and I listen close. I can relate to having fights with the people in my family. I'm not talking light arguments about bathroom time. I'm talking some nasty fights. Fights that I regret. When my friend...we'll call him Vern...facebooked me needing me to lend an ear...I could NOT say no.


Vern went to Trevecca with me for a semester and a couple weeks. He became one of my really close friends. I did one of his favorite impressions. He moved to another Nazarene University a couple weeks into second semester, and that made it difficult to be able to bond. Doesn't mean I'm not there for him. SO. The other night Vern facebooked me. He had gotten in a HUGE and nasty fight with his mom a day or so before and things were not looking so great. He'd said some unnecessary things to his mom, she left upset, his dad went after her. His dad came home crying, his mom returned and didn't eat for a couple days, and Vern didn't sleep for a couple days. By the time he came to me for advice, he had gone I think, oh, 3 days without sleeping. We began to talk. Every bit of advice I gave him would be returned with an excuse for why it wouldn't work or why it hadn't worked because he had tried it already. I got VERY frustrated. I just wanted to grab his shoulders (by now we were on skype. I was talking, he was typing) and shake him and yell in his face. Why ask someone for advice when you aren't going to take it?


Then I realized. He never really came out and asked me for my advice. All he said was that he needed me. Vern just needed an ear. That ear belonged to me. 


After a little while, we were on the subject of God. Of course he believes in him. That wasn't the point. He wanted me to help him answer a question that he has been wanting an answer for since he took theology last semester. "Is God responsible for all the good on Earth...?" Wow. How do I answer that? I am no theologian. I am no reverend, no minister, no one qualified (well, who really is qualified when it comes to knowing things about GOD?) enough to answer something like that. All I could tell him was to get the book Crazy Love by Francis Chan. I'm not even through the first chapter and I'm in awe of a God that I've been learning about since birth. (I'll leave that to another blog) I told Vern to read this book and to think about our God and let HIM handle things. That's the only way he was going to get through his trials. I told him not to worry about the bad things that were happening. I told him not to focus on things that were out of control. I told him to stop thinking and start worshiping the God that was capable of handling everything for him. That's all I could tell him.


I talked to Vern yesterday. You want to know what his reply was when I asked him how things were going?


"They are a lot better."


Peace & Blessins', 
College Girl