What a Friend We Have in Jesus

And what do you do? Isn’t that the question we all dread at class reunions, dinner parties, really any kind of meet and greet where we’re asked to explain ourselves in terms of work? In honor of Labor Day, the day that honors work, I’ll share a vignette from a time when I was still a slave to the notion that my worth was defined by my academic or professional work.

*************************************************************************************  

May 1975. After graduation, at the tender age of twenty-something, my college boyfriend, John, and I moved in together. No promises, just co-habitating, the new name for what my dad called living in sin or shacking up.

We rented a third-floor apartment in West Springfield with only a space heater for heat which worried John’s mother, but it had a claw foot tub which I loved. No shower. The kitchen was huge but had a sloping ceiling that made most of the space unusable. That was okay. We only had a card table and two chairs to fill it.  

Our landlord lived downstairs. When I handed his wife the rent check, she was friendly, but there was no space to get to know her before one of her pre-school kids yelled, “Mommy.”

The woman on the first floor looked my age, but whenever I said hi, she was too busy watching her little boys ride their Big Wheels to carry on a conversation.   

Oh, how I missed, Gretchen, my college roommate.  

One night, John and I walked to a neighborhood bar to play pool. It was nothing like the college bar where we met. The downstairs was dimly lit and almost empty save a few disheveled gents on barstools. John and I stepped up a level to a small table under florescent lights. I was no match for his skill, and there was nobody else to challenge him. I couldn’t wait to walk the few blocks home. The place reeked of cigarettes, stale beer, and loneliness.   

It was New Year’s Eve by the time we were invited to our first party. The invitation was technically for John to a kind of neighborhood reunion with childhood friends. We took the Peter Pan bus to Northampton and walked past Smith College. The sky was star studded, no moon. A thin layer of snow scrunched under our boots. Our warm breath clouded the silence.

I followed John up icy steps. “Whose apartment is this again?”

John rang the bell. “Davey O’Shea’s.” We could hear music from the porch. “He’s in a band.”  The door opened. A guy with long brown curls put his acoustic guitar aside and grabbed John in a bear hug.

 “Johnny, long time no see. Glad you could make it, man.” He reached to pump my hand. “Welcome.” Then back to John. “The whole crowd is here. Mingle, mingle. There’s food in the dining room and beer in the fridge.”  

The house was crowded and smelled like pot. Every surface was sat on, windowsills, coffee tables, sofas, chairs, stairs, the floor. We wound through the kitchen, and I grabbed my first Molson’s.   

“Great to see you, Johnny!” was the chorus as we made our way through the crush of long-lost friends and acquaintances, and everyone offered a personal update.

Evie, a tall, brunette in black polyester pantsuit told us she’d graduated Brown and was currently at Harvard Medical School. John whispered as we passed, “Showed me her underpants in third grade.”

Rob, a stocky guy in chinos and a blue button-down shirt, told us he graduated University of Penn and was currently in the psychology PHD program at Ohio Wesleyan. John whispered, “Not allowed to ride his bike to elementary school or sled down Clarke’s hill.”

Griswold, a tall redhead told us he was at Western New England law school. John whispered, “Hucked a chunk of ice at me from the top of the playground snowbank and broke my nose. His dad, also a lawyer, sent lots of presents.”

Everyone I met that evening gave a kind of curriculum vitae without being asked. I guess it made an impression because thank God, no one was interested in me. What would I have said if someone asked, and what do you do? What were the euphemisms for I’m a dime-a-dozen English major shacking up with John in an attic tenement, paid minimum wage at a bookstore, and friendless? And what would John’s whisper have been? Picked her up in a college bar?

After midnight, and more Molsons, I lost track of John and sat on a love seat in the foyer next to a girl with long blonde hair and tortoise shell glasses. She offered no preemptive CV. Instead, she listened as I confessed what it was to be out of college with no clue, no plans, no peers. She patted my shoulder and said, “You sound so lonesome.”

Did I carry the same stench as those disheveled gents on the barstools? Were they as desperate as I was for someone, anyone, to listen, to care? Why did I need a girl with a college degree to tell me I was simply lonely? Suddenly I was wiping sloppy tears from my cheeks, flooded by the shame of exposing my weakness to a stranger. Or was it the ridiculous hope that without any impressive credentials, I was worth a bosom friend who understood?.

John appeared and took my hand as we walked back into the freezing darkness. His whispered comment. “That blonde girl, Margaret, is a pastor’s daughter.” It had been a long time since I’d been to church, but his quiet comment called to mind a hymn from when I was a little girl, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Looking back, it was a hard transition coming out of a collegiate bubble where my academic success or failure was constantly graded. It was a hard thing not to transfer some kind of marking system to my professional status. An easy thing to equate my professional and financial accomplishment to my personal worth.

So, whether you’re a young woman heading to college for the first time, a new graduate thrust into the world of work, or coming off a summer vacation weary of going back to a stressful or unrewarding job, here’s what I didn’t know way back when.

Jesus is the bosom friend of every disheveled soul who yearns to be

seen and clean,

with a worth that

cannot be earned or burned.

And friends of Jesus, are the friends I need.

Labor Day is a day of rest from work. So, let’s remember that Jesus’ earthly resume wasn’t impressive to most, a carpenter turned itinerant preacher.

But let’s rest on Jesus’ heavenly credentials: the miracle-working son of God, crucified to pay for all our whispered humiliations and regrets,

who invites us to his victory party.

Where: our heavenly father’s home,

When: now and forever

Attire: Come as you are

No gifts necessary. Gifts provided.

Bring a friend if you like

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-not by works, so that no one can boast.”

Ephesians 2: 8-9 (NIV)

Cover photo by Timon Studler on Unsplash

Copyright Ann C. Averill 2022

.