Amy Boucher Pye

Category: Friendship Fridays

  • Friendship Fridays: Best friends by Keren Dibbens-Wyatt

    Wise and winsome words from Keren on deep friendship. Much to ponder and celebrate:

    Bev and I sat and held hands. There was so much to say that we didn’t even try. Silence said it better, and of course she was wary of tiring me. Here she was at last, my anam cara, soul friend, sitting right next to me. Normally, she would be several thousand miles away in Vancouver, me here in the UK. We met on the internet, which can be a wonderful place – I met my husband there too. On that memorable day a few years ago, she came visiting, she and her family having made a stopover especially.

    That’s the thing about best friends, or your beloved, they know and love you without you having to do or say anything much. They recognise something in you that speaks to their heart. They understand your sense of humour. Two signs of a great friendship or relationship are that you can sit in a comfortable silence and still commune, and that you don’t have to explain the joke.

    God is like that too. Who knows us better than the one who made us? A fellow Christian once asked me who my best friend was. Without hesitation, I said, “God.”

    He frowned, “Oh. Most people would say Jesus.”

    I felt I was being corrected. I’ve always prayed to God the Father through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. I see them as One. And though it’s true that they are, it’s easier, perhaps, to relate to Jesus, the human extension of God into his own creation. We can imagine those eyes smiling at us, like Bev’s eyes sparkled at me that precious day.

    We know the stories so well, we feel it might be us sitting in the boat or breaking bread with this person who knows us completely. The one who knew everything the Samaritan woman ever did, or read Nathaniel’s heart so thoroughly he saw there was no guile in it.

    Jesus knows us too. He will always travel the distance, be comfortable with us, look us in the eyes, and always, always get the joke. 

    Keren Dibbens-Wyatt is a chronically ill Christian contemplative, writer and artist. She has a passion for prayer, poetry, story and colour. Her writing features regularly in literary journals and anthologies (Fathom, Amethyst Review, The Blue Nib, Linen Press, Orchard Lea Press), and on spiritual blogs (The Redbud Post, Contemplative Light, Godspace). She is the author of the books Recital of Love (Paraclete Press, 2020) and Young Bloody Mary (Mogzilla Books, 2023). Keren lives in South-East England and suffers from M.E., which keeps her housebound and out of the trouble she would doubtless get into otherwise.

    Explore friendship with Jesus in Transforming Love. Find it – including a free copy of the introduction and first chapter – here.

  • Friendship Fridays: My sister, my friend

    I thought it would be fun to kick off this series, following Sheridan Voysey’s foreword to Transforming Love last week, by sharing about my friendship with my sister. Sibling relationships can be intense and it’s not always guaranteed that sisters and brothers will be friends. Mine are:

    My sister Beth has always been part of my life—when I arrived I uprooted her from her position as the only child. A few years later, when my brother was born, I took the middle place. Brothers and sisters can share a special bond, as I do with Paul, but there’s something unique about sisterly love.

    Growing up, Beth was the trailblazer, the one to wear down our parents about when we could get our ears pierced, or wear makeup, or have later curfews. I benefitted from her quiet persistence—even though I was one of the last to wear makeup in my group of friends.

    Beth kept up her independent streak and moved out at an early age. Not having her at home changed our relationship, although I didn’t realize it then. We no longer fought over who would take the first shower or who was using the phone. We grew apart somewhat, with me focused on the last years of high school and her launching into her nursing work and relationship with Dave.

    Although Beth and I were never distant, geography during my university years and after meant we didn’t enjoy a day-to-day relationship. Interestingly, after marrying Nicholas, when I moved from Washington, DC, to England, I became much closer with my sister. Feeling bereft of my lively social and professional life while being thrust into an unfamiliar culture, I looked to Beth for companionship. I found her continued gentle spirit ready to listen, to connect, to offer counsel.

    She appears in my early memories out of proximity, but in more recent years out of choice. Beth and I are different—she pours out her special expression of compassion and love through her nursing, now with hospice care, while I’m not great even when family members aren’t well. And I know she’d find speaking to a group not on her list of preferred activities. But we don’t have to be similar to love each other. I can always count on Beth—she won’t let me down. That we share a faith in our loving God gives me even more gratitude and joy.

    Why not consider your own sibling relations, if you have them, or that of close cousins or childhood friends. How is your relationship with them? How could you strengthen it today?

    Explore friendship with Jesus in Transforming Love. Find it – including a free copy of the introduction and first chapter – here.

  • Friendship Fridays: Sheridan Voysey on why friendship matters

    Hearing that my friend Sheridan Voysey would introduce my new book Transforming Love: How Friendship with Jesus Changes Us thrilled me. Sheridan heads up the new Friendship Lab and is doing important work to further not only the understanding about the importance of friendship but to help people to deepen these important relationships in their lives. I’m so enjoying the pilot course he’s running. Enjoy his foreword to my book:

    As survey after survey and headline after headline remind us, the recovery of deep friendship is the great need of the hour. Our countries, communities and even some of our churches are getting lonelier by the year as we live, work and worship alone, surrounded by many but connected meaningfully to few.

    I have long had a hunch that the stories of Mary, Martha and Lazarus in the Gospels hold clues to remedy our situation. The three siblings seem to have found a special place in Jesus’s heart. We find them offering Jesus hospitality in their home, eating and resting together. We’re told repeatedly that Jesus ‘loves’ this trio, a term of affection used of no one else but the apostle John (who uses it of himself, and only once). The bond they forge is so close that when Lazarus falls ill the sisters don’t have to mention his name, saying only, ‘Lord, the one you love is ill’ (John 11:3). And yet none of the three is part of Jesus’s inner twelve, or his larger group of seventy-two disciples. Mary, Martha and Lazarus aren’t Jesus’s ministry colleagues – they’re his friends.

    We can go further. At the friendship project I lead, Friendship Lab, we describe a friend as someone we can talk to, depend on, grow with and enjoy, and each of these elements is present in the siblings’ relationship with Jesus. Look at how intimate their conversations get, with Martha free to express her frustrations and Mary free to express her disappointment, even in him. See how they can depend on Jesus to help their sick brother, even when it puts his own life at risk. Read how Mary and Martha grow in faith, getting opportunities to learn and serve typically reserved for men in their time, and how Lazarus (literally) steps into a new season of life. Watch how they enjoy each other at celebratory dinner parties. This kind of affection, connection and support is what our lonely age longs for.

    And so I’m thrilled to introduce Transforming Love by my friend Amy Boucher Pye. With imaginative exploration of these biblical stories and sensitivity to overlooked cultural details, Amy teases out this unique relationship and the transformative effect it has on Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Because at its best friendship is transformative, shaping our characters and destinies like few other forces can, and what’s true of natural friendship is multiplied hundredfold when Jesus is involved. As Amy takes us into the three key encounters the siblings have with him, ushering us into the story as if it were we instead of they who are sitting at Jesus’s feet, being comforted in our loss, or feeling our cold bodies return to life, we come to claim our status as Jesus’s friends too, and the transformation they receive becomes our own. Combined with Amy’s guiding prayers and creative spiritual practices, the result is a rich, graceful exploration of how Jesus befriends and changes us.

    Like other aspects of life, friendship flourishes when we have healthy models to emulate. Well, here’s the model. As a mountain-top waterfall nourishes the valley below it, Jesus is the source of deep friendship, our vertical relationship with him flowing to the horizontal relationships around us. Let’s cup our hands, drink deeply and let this friendship with God transform us into the finest of friends to others.

    Read more in Transforming Love. Find it – including a free copy of the introduction and first chapter – here.