Having a friend close to you, both emotionally and spiritually, can devastate your soul when they decide to end your friendship. The questions you begin to ask yourself, the emotions that flow through your body, and the feeling of painful loss can change you as a person.
One minute everything is right in the world and the next it feels like you’ve been stabbed in the heart and left to bleed.
So how can we stop this bleeding heart? How do we stand back up and keep going? How do we heal from the wound that will either fester, become infected, and kill us or make us stronger in our Christian faith?
In order to be whole again, we must start the healing process.
My Friendship
Back when I was in college I met a girl and we ended up, through many circumstances, developing a very close bond. You can read about our beginning together in my blog post, Being A Friend To The Wounded. The amount of time and heartbreak we went through together made us emotionally and spiritually invested in our friendship.
After we both graduated from college and moved hundreds of miles away from each other, we kept the friendship going. Sure it wasn’t all the time like before. But we made it a point to either call or email one another at least 1-2x a month. We were always there, supporting each other in our Christian faith and confronting in love if we were falling away from God.
As we grew more into adulthood our lives began to change. I was married and had a child and she was having a much harder home life. Due to sin at home, there was a falling out between her and her beloved mother and sister. They all felt it was better if she left the house. But she did not have a lot of money. She lived in one of the most expensive cities in the most expensive state of America and her family was poor already. She couldn’t afford her own car, let alone her own place to live.
She ended up moving to her grandparent’s home and lived in their garage. They only spoke Spanish, which she did not speak, so communication with them was pretty limited. She was able to find a job that gave her enough hours and she slowly started to get back up on her feet.
Her life was upside down but she was still cheerful in the Lord. She would always tell me about how many blessings she had when she was so close to being homeless and destitute. I was in awe at how much her relationship with God had changed her from where she used to be. Her love and faith in God made me ashamed of how much I had and how I took it all for granted.
The Cycles of Grief
Have you ever heard of the cycles of grief? When a friendship is cut off your body goes through many emotions unconsciously. Your emotions are the cycles of grief that you must experience to heal from the pain of loss.
There are 5 stages of emotions that you will be faced with after the event. And believe it or not, if you don’t do some soul searching and at least think about each of these emotions you can’t put the past behind you. You will live in that moment forever and always.
And no matter how tough you are or how much you try to put it aside, the natural grief will hurt you from the inside out.
To move forward we must create something new. Not regain the old and not live in what was. We must decide to change ourselves for the better and not become bitter from the experience. Bitterness always leads to a life of needless sorrow. To start the process of becoming something new, we must go through these 5 emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
The First Emotion: Denial
In one of our emails, my friend was so excited to tell me she had a boyfriend. Finally, something was going right in her life. Finally, someone loved her and treated her as precious. I asked questions via email and, although I was very excited for her too, I found out that her boyfriend was not a Christian.
Now there is really nothing wrong with that. But if you are going to give your life to a person, make critical and fateful life decisions with them and try to, together, create a life with the same goals and beliefs, you need to have the same faith.
A Christian’s faith is the core of their being. It is who they are even down to their soul. If you are not the same spiritually, then I can guarantee you, your life will be chaos and heartache. It will not grow as deeply and intimately as being married to someone with the same resolve and purpose as you.
My friend had emailed this to me so I sent her an email back. I told her how happy I was for her but I also warned her what could happen if she dated him and what the Bible advised on the issue.
Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what [a]fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what [b]communion has light with darkness?
2 Corinthians 6:14
One of my core beliefs is that you should not date someone unless you have even a speck of interest in marrying them someday. I’m not saying once you date, you have to marry them. But dating gives memories, memories lead to familiarity and love, and love leads to marriage. Being a friend causes memories too, but it does not give the hope that there will be more. You are just friends.
And I knew that, if by chance my friend married this man, she would have the life I mentioned previously. An unequal marriage with two different paths and visions. I knew that this was falling out of God’s plan for her. This was my motive for telling her why I believed she was making mistake in the long run. I was trying to be a good friend who kept her on the right path for her faith. However, she did not feel the same.
To say a long story short, she ghosted me. I received no more phone calls or emails. At the time I didn’t realize what was happening. I was in denial of her ghosting me because I never would have thought she would do that to me. To just cut me off without so much as an explanation or a rebuttal. To have such a lack of love that she thought our friendship wasn’t worth the discussion. It was easy to deny when you didn’t see it coming.
But with the circumstances, it made sense that something bad could have happened. She had told me her Aunt didn’t want her in her grandparent’s garage so maybe she was homeless. Her job was giving her very few hours so maybe she couldn’t afford her phone anymore. Her laptop was on the brink of death so maybe it finally died. Maybe she didn’t have my home address so she couldn’t even write me a letter.
After 3 months of not hearing from her, I was extremely worried. This was not like her. I sent a letter to her grandparents house with a stamped envelope and letter so she could write me back and let me know she was ok. Nothing happened. I sent a letter in Spanish to her grandparent’s to see if they could let me know what happened. Nothing came back.
I seriously thought at this point she was homeless, dead, or taken into sex trafficking. I ended up texting a mutual acquaintance and asking her if she had heard from my friend.
She sent me a text that put the knife in my heart. She said that my friend was doing great. She was currently enjoying ComicCon with her boyfriend.
So…she was fine. She wasn’t homeless, dead, or a victim. She was getting all of my mail, emails, and texts. She was just ignoring them. She let me think these desperate thoughts about her and didn’t care how worried I was.
I had never felt a hurt quite like this before. It felt like a knife stabbed into my very soul and I slumped to the floor barely breathing, staring ahead, and unable to process what had happened. My love for her and the worry that I had felt for her all those months were pointless. It wasn’t her in trouble, it was her secretly telling me, “I want nothing to do with you anymore.”
The Second Emotion: Anger
After I received the text the hurt was so strong in my heart that, not knowing how to process this new knowledge, I turned to anger. I kept having thoughts swirl inside my head:
- I can’t believe she could just dump our relationship without even talking to me!
- Was this one guy so amazing that 6 years of friendship meant nothing?!
- I have wasted so many hours and years caring about you!
- You don’t get to treat me like a door mat! I know my worth!
- I haven’t done anything worthy of being ghosted!
- What a cowardly way to finish a friendship, if you are mad at me tell me to my face!
- I can’t even defend myself or work on our relationship! How can I mean nothing to you?!
- Did you ever care about me? Or was I always someone you could use and abuse as you saw fit?
- Was any of it real?
- Why did I try so hard when all I am left with is this pain?
Thankfully, the week it happened I had a close friend from Tennessee staying at my house. She helped me get through all the questions swirling in my head and allowed me to express myself without judgment. She talked me through it. She assured my wavering heart. She showed me bible verses that let me know I had done the right thing. She was there to hold my hand and let me go through this emotion with her and not alone. She was there to cry with me. It was as if God knew exactly what I would need at that moment. He was using my friend as a vessel to say what He wanted me to hear. To give me the comfort I so greatly needed.
If you are going through this emotion remember these Biblical principles:
1.) Matthew 5:4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Mourn the loss. Look to God for comfort and He assures us that He will give it to us.
2.) Ephesians 4:26 “Be angry and sin not, do not let the sun go down upon your anger”
It is ok to have the emotion of anger, but you must take care of it right away. Don’t put it off and let it fester and grow. Work through it while it is fresh.
3.) James 1:20 “For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”
The path of continually being angry will never help your Christian faith. It will never make you more like Christ and it will never produce good fruit in God’s ministry.
The Third Emotion: Bargaining
Part of the reason we begin to bargain and remain with the friend, although they have hurt us so badly, is because we don’t want to change and we want the pain to stop. We want to be who we were before. Change makes us uncomfortable, it takes us to a place that is unknown and different. Losing friendship means we have to find new friends. It also makes us feel like the years that we were friends robbed us of something beautiful we could have had. Now we are filled with something that has tainted our memories, so we don’t want to have it end. We want to remember it as a beautiful thing.
But maybe you don’t even bargain with your friend to get the friendship back. Maybe you start to bargain with God. Maybe you go to their friends or family and try to get them to favorable speak about you to the friend. Maybe you go to social media and apply pressure for them to take you back.
No matter what way you do this, the result will not be good. If you get the friend back it will only further damage both of your hearts and make you both resentful. No good thing can come from a broken relationship being made anew without a lot of work put in first. Bargaining will never correct life. It will never make the pain disappear and it will never give you what once was.
In my circumstances, I was ghosted. I wasn’t even given the chance to bargain. She decided communication would no longer be possible so I was forced to skip this emotion and went straight to depression.
The Fourth Emotion: Depression
Depression is a mental condition I don’t believe I will ever understand. I am usually a very happy, go-lucky person. But I have had bouts of depression that have come out of nowhere. Sometimes I could understand why I was depressed and other times I had no idea why, I just was. But whatever form of depression you are going through does not mean that you are broken. God allows us to have depression for a reason.
Sometimes I seriously think Satan uses depression in people to hurt them in their walk with God and their faithfulness to Him. Just as people lose physical limbs, their possessions in a fire, or loved ones, being depressed can cause us to turn from our Christian faith and become unable to function for God’s Kingdom.
And although Satan means for it to harm you, God uses depression to work through you. If you deal with depression and you figure out how to get through it, you now have the ability to help those who don’t know Christ and have depression. God creates you into the perfect missionary for other depressed individuals. You would know better than anyone else what you must do, the thoughts you must have, the obstacles you must face. He wants you to bring these people to God’s salvation, full of hope and joy.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.”
2 Corinthians 1:3-4
It could also be that God needs you to think through your own life and change in an area. Depression causes us to no longer look to others or articles online for advice. Our conversation goes inward. We begin to do some self-reflection.
This is the time when God will show us something we had never noticed before. A sin that might be affecting us negatively. Or maybe it’s seeing if we are willing to make a drastic change in our life, one that we never desired to do. Perhaps it’s just that we need to take some time to heal from emotional or spiritual hurt. I mean we slow down and heal from ribs that are broken, should we only heal from physical problems? No, we need to rest from mental pain too.
When I became depressed from losing my friend I also turned inward. No longer was I angry about what had happened but I realized that my anger was actually sadness. I was sad we were no longer friends. I was sad that our relationship had ended so poorly. I was sad that someone who meant so much to me did not feel the same.
As I thought inwardly, I also sought other fellow Christians in my church for comfort. Someone to work my feelings through. My friend had already left and I just needed a Christian woman to talk to about the realization of the emotions I was going through and figuring out how to put it behind me.
I also wanted someone that could give me a good Bible verse of comfort. Maybe take the time to pray with me and let me know that someone was willing to go through it with me and that I wasn’t alone. I just wanted them to hear me and see the pain I had and be there for me.
But what I got did not help my depression. They told me things like:
- Just pray about it.
- You’re only in this for a season. Soon it will be over.
- You are better off without her as a friend.
- I’m sorry this happened. I’ll be praying for you.
And although all these people meant these words out of love and care, it felt so dismissive. It felt like they were saying get over it. It’s done and there’s nothing you can change. Or I really don’t want to talk about this and hear your story so how about I just say a short prayer for you at some point?
It was as if people didn’t want to be involved in my life.
Now I know these women. I know none of them meant to hurt me. None of them were saying what I felt like they were saying. But let me give this advice to other Christians. When someone is talking about a problem that they are having in their life…you don’t have to sound spiritual. You don’t have to have something amazingly profound to say. Just be present. Just ask questions. Just help guide.
God will give us His words when it is time. Don’t feel like you have to force a Christian answer. Let it flow naturally. That is the way to help someone. We all just need to feel heard and have the knowledge that we are not alone. We don’t need empty words that offer nothing. We need the encouragement to keep going and fighting through the emotions we feel and
“I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.”
Psalm 40:1-2
The Fifth Emotion: Acceptance
The final emotion that we must face is acceptance. There is nothing we can do to change what happened. We cannot go back to what once was, we must move forward to what we want to be. We must imagine a new future. We must accept that this is our reality, stop resisting it, and learn how to live with it or despite it. You will never lose the pain, but you will learn something from it. You are no longer surviving. You are beginning to thrive again.
So do yourself a favor and allow yourself to have the emotions that God gave us. For example, in Ephesians 4:26, God says to be angry and sin not. He is not saying you shouldn’t be angry or you should push aside the emotion. He is simply saying have the emotion but don’t do anything wrong with that emotion.
We see people throughout the Bible experiencing what we perceive to be “negative emotions.” But God does not tell them to get over it. God does not tell them that they need to have a stiff lip and take it like a man. God lets them go through the emotion and make a choice about how they are going to react to that emotion. Sometimes God will talk it through with us, and sometimes he lets us face the emotion on our own.
I think of Peter. In Matthew 26:59-75 we see Peter allowing his emotion to cause him to sin. He had fear in his heart when people began to surround him and say he was a disciple of Christ, all while Jesus was being beaten and cursed and ready to be crucified.
Anyone would have been afraid at that moment, I know I would. But God gave him the opportunity to take action, to stand with Christ, or to dismiss him as a nobody. Peter made his choice to reject Christ due to his fear.
God understood he would be afraid. But God’s rebuke was letting him go through the emotion that came with his choice. The grief of rejecting his Lord, his Savior, and his friend. The worst grief that Peter would ever have, but God knew it would make his faith stronger.
But He was not just willing to be done with Peter, for God knew he would become a great vessel for the Gospel. Jesus rose from the dead and came to speak with Peter. In John 21:15-19, Jesus restores their relationship and gives Peter a mission. The mission is to tell the world of Christ. He did not just leave Peter broken and emotionally in despair. He picked him up, helped renew his heart, and gave him a new purpose.
I have this one assurance that no matter how much you are grieving, no matter how debilitating of an emotion you are facing to where it is affecting your mind, body, and soul, God is there. He will never let us go alone. He promises that to us.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;
For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
Psalm 23:4
And not only will He go through it with us, but He will also assuredly take us out of it. He will give us the strength necessary to restore our hearts. Changing us again, not to who we once were, but to someone wiser, bolder, and deeper in love with Him.
- Psalm 34:18-The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
- Matthew 11:28-30-Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
- Psalms 73:26-My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
At this point, you might still be wondering what happened between me and my friend.
Once I got through all of the emotions of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, I needed to write her a letter. This was to finalize the reality I was now in. I sent her an email, which I knew she wouldn’t read, and it explained everything I was feeling. Every hurt I had, every emotion I went through, and what the root cause of it all was. I told her I still loved her and, even though she wants nothing to do with me, I still wish her happiness. I still longed to be her friend. I let her know that I forgave her for ghosting me. I was going to keep praying for her and cherishing the memories we had.
Once I wrote that email and sent it. I felt at peace. I was no longer living in the past, I put it behind me. Now I could focus on my future and who I wanted to be. She still has not written me back or communicated with me in the slightest. But now it does not haunt me.
Have you put your past behind you? Have you come to terms with it? Have you thought through the events that took place and allowed yourself to go through the emotions you were having?
If not, then please do. Care for yourself as much as you would care for others. Take your cares to God in prayer.
He is listening and waiting to hear your story.
