My Closest Friend Has Never Seen It

She knows everything.

She knows about your marriage. She knows what your mother said in 2011 and what it did to you. She has sat with you in a hospital corridor and given you care in weeks nobody else noticed, and she was the first person you rang when the thing happened, before your sister, before anybody.

Twenty years, and there is nothing you have not told her.

Except that she has never seen your face.

Not the one you are wearing at eleven o'clock at night. She has never once been in a room with it. Every meeting, in twenty years, has been preceded by a preparation, and the preparation has been so ordinary that neither of you has ever thought about it.

I have sat with the de churched and the searching and the exhausted for a long time, and I have found that this is more common than anybody says, and that it is almost never noticed by the woman doing it.

There is one condition on that friendship, and it has been there the whole time, and only one of you knows it exists.

What a condition does to a closeness

Here is what I want to look at, and it is not about faces at all.

A friendship with one condition on it is not quite a friendship without one, and the difference does not show up anywhere you could point to.

She would call you her closest friend and she would mean it. You would say the same. Everything either of you has ever said about the other is entirely true.

And there is one thing, and it has never been available, and neither of you has ever mentioned it because she does not know and you have never had a word for it.

You are inside a closeness that has one thing held out of it, and no part of that has ever once been about anything she did. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman a condition she has never named, and Exodus 33 has a friendship described in a way that is not used anywhere else in the Bible.

And here is the cost, and it is not what you think.

It is not that she is being deceived. Nothing dishonest is going on and I am not going to let you turn this into that.

The cost is time. Twenty years of meetings that had to be arranged around a preparation, which means there are afternoons that did not happen, and drop ins that did not occur, and one Tuesday about four years ago when she was upset and rang and you said you would come over and got there forty minutes later than you needed to.

The condition has quietly shaped how a friendship runs, and neither of you would recognize it if it were described.

You are running a friendship with a scheduling requirement on it, and she has never once known there was a reason for the forty minutes. Scripture in Exodus 33 says the Lord spake unto Moses face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a condition off a closeness.

Face to face as a friend

There is a line in Exodus about how God spoke to a man, and the comparison it uses is remarkable.

And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. (Exodus 33:11, King James Version)

Face to face. And the explanation attached, as a man speaketh unto his friend.

That is the whole definition of friendship in that verse. Face to face. Not in a message, not through somebody else, and not with an arrangement in between.

Which means the physical is not incidental to a friendship in Scripture. It is the thing the word is defined by.

You are made for a face to face rather than an arranged one, and no friendship in Scripture has ever once been defined by anything else. It is written in Exodus 33 that the Lord spake unto Moses face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an arrangement out from between two people.

And there is something else in that chapter which is worth having, because it is the reverse of everything you might expect.

Two chapters later, Moses is the one who comes down with his face changed, and he puts a veil on. And Exodus is careful to record when he wore it and when he did not.

He took it off when he went in to speak with God. He put it on when he came back out to the people.

So the covering was for the crowd, and the uncovering was for the friendship, and that is the exact reverse of the arrangement you have been running for twenty years.

You are covering for the closest one and uncovering for nobody, and Moses has never once been recorded doing it that way round. The Spirit of God is what reverses an order that got the wrong way about, and the written word says the Lord spake unto Moses face to face.

One afternoon, unprepared

So here is the assignment, and it is one afternoon.

See your closest friend once this week without getting ready first.

Ring her at two and say come round. Go to hers on the way back from something. Say yes to a thing at short notice that you would normally have declined.

The point is not the face. The point is the short notice, because the short notice is the thing that makes the preparation impossible, and the preparation is the condition.

You are being given short notice on purpose, and the preparation has never once been the thing a friendship was actually asking of you. Exodus 33 says the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an unprepared face into friendship rather than exposure.

And do not tell her about this. She has done nothing and she is not part of the problem and there is nothing here she needs to be brought into. This is not a confession and she is not owed one.

If she notices anything at all, which she almost certainly will not, she will notice that you came round quickly.

You are able to say yes at short notice once, and no afternoon of that friendship has ever once been arranged around anything she asked for. The written word in Exodus 33 defines a friendship by face to face, and the Holy Spirit is what turns one unprepared afternoon into care rather than into a test.