Friend

I was raised in a God-fearing home. My mother got saved in 1986 after a divorce and a recent layoff from being an anchor on Channel 7. She had accrued $100,000 of debt because of some shenanigans with my father. He decided to run for president of Haiti not once, but twice, abandoning the medical practice that he built to focus on his campaigns.

Picture of a picture of my family before my parents divorced. I think this is of us at my Baby Christening.

We moved to DC from Long Island after they separated. I was four, and we were living on our own in a pre-war condo located in a landmarked district of Northwest DC. Between her mortgage, HOA fees, and the unexpected bills she and her fellow neighbors continued to receive to fix the elevators and other decaying building fixtures, she was stressed. She had bills and no revenue. She had local celebrity but nowhere to use it. She had lots of questions about how we'd make it and not a ton of answers...but God.

My mom reporting a story in somewhere in the city before she got her anchor role.

I spent my entire life listening to my mother share her testimony of how she was able to overcome all of these obstacles because of her relationship with Jesus Christ. There's never been a day in my life where Jesus has not been a part of it. I'm not a person who was raised by a born-again Christian only to ultimately turn my back on the principles that raised me. I'm also not as evangelical as my mom. But, I've never turned my back on what I was taught as a child...and maybe that's because I saw His miracles working in our lives at such a young age.

As a child, the adults around me always talked about the importance of having a relationship with Christ. They talked about how having one meant I'd never be alone; I'd always have a heavenly Father to call on when the going got tough, and I'd always have someone to give thanks when good things happened. Did I understand the nuances of having a relationship with someone I could not see at that age? Absolutely not. But I prayed and continued to talk to God throughout my days as I got older. I memorized scripture and sometimes repeated them back to myself when faced with issues I could not easily solve. I didn't realize that the silent conversations I had with Him throughout the day and the audible ones that punctuated my mornings and evenings were part of me building this "relationship" with Him.

Today, in church the visiting pastor was preaching about temptation. He talked about the friend we have in Jesus to help us overcome our vices and I don't know why it took me 42 years to really understand this, but Jesus has always been my friend. He's that voice I can go to whenever I'm crying for help or want to give thanks. As a child, I thought this relationship with Christ was a more formal engagement that I should be aspiring to. But today, I realized the one I've had with Him is the one all the adults in my life talked about when I was a child. I've never given him a physical hug or shaken his hand but it's His voice that guides me.

Picture of us last year at Easter.

A couple of weeks ago, Ila and I were talking about all the different internal voices we can hear throughout the day. Some voices are critical and mean while others can be kind. Depending on the things our parents or teachers said to us as children, the voices we hear may be more of one than the other, but as adults we get to choose which of our inner voices we will honor and listen to.

Today, I felt grateful that Jesus has always been my friend, the inner voice that walks with me everywhere and that I can celebrate with, call on, and cry to.

When our kids ask why we have to go to church, I tell them this can be a cold, dark world and we need light to walk through it. Jesus is the light. And we go to church to learn how to be more like Him all the while getting to know him so that He can walk with us through it all.

I'm not sure what your faith is or if you have one, but I hope that you have something bigger than you to go to now more than ever.

Petrushka
Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach