There’s a reason for all those “one another” verses in the Bible. We are imperfect people trying to relate to other imperfect people. But we need not resign ourselves to disappointment and disillusionment. The right perspective can remind us that good things still come from not-always-good people.

In a church I recently visited, this “news” item was reprinted on the back of the bulletin:

This comes as huge relief. It explains nearly everything. This accounts—finally, and thank goodness—for why I’m having such a hard time growing up.

It’s your fault.

If I had only to deal with me, talk to me, pray about me, get close to me, be honest with me; if only the groups I associated with had my kind of people in them—namely, me—I might long ago have reached a state of sinless perfection.

But as Stu keenly observes, “Having other people in the picture complicates things.”

Indeed.

Stu’s singularly singular Bible study may be novel, but his insight hardly is. Having other people in the picture does complicate things. We’ve known this since the garden. One day we behold our companions with wonder and gratitude: Ah, look! Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh! We sense a kinship so rich that, at long last and forevermore, we can be naked and feel no shame.

The next day, we find ourselves seething with blame: “This person You gave me—this person ruined everything!”

Many relationships are only one hard bite away from breakdown. With breathtaking abruptness, they can shift from thanksgiving to resentment, praise to reviling, openness to hiddenness. A subtle insult, a slight curtness, a hint of slander can damage intimacy and lead quickly to estrangement.

It has happened to me. More than once, I’m afraid to say. I look back on many friendships and see only a rubble of memories. What went wrong? In some cases, nothing. One of us moved, and we were both too lazy to write. One of us fell in love, and a deeper call took hold. We were in a season of life, and the season changed.

But there are other cases: Fights never resolved. Accusations never cleared up. Jealousies never dealt with. Rivalries never confessed.

Joel, for instance. For close to two years you couldn’t part us. We both had young brides we loved, no children yet to consume our energies. At the height of life’s summertime, we discovered the extra richness of good manly companionship. It seemed we could talk about anything: music, marriage, our fears, our deepest convictions, our madcap ambitions. We talked about God—not in some smarmy, pious way, but in a way I think Paul and Silas, trudging from town to town or bent over a common task or shackled side by side in a prison cell, talked about Him: earthy and urgent and real, wrestling theological truth into the messiness of the everyday.

For almost two years it was like that. Deep calling to deep. Iron sharpening iron. I could drop in on Joel anytime, he on me. There was nothing between us.

And then there was. To this day, I don’t know exactly what. But we started being less open with each other. Little irritations, always there, flared into major annoyances and then into unsolvable grievances. I started complaining to my wife about Joel. I think he might have been doing likewise with his wife. Before, goodwill and shared respect had reinforced each other, spiraling up and up and up. Now ill will and mutual wariness pushed each other down and down and down. Within a few months, one of the richest friendships I’ve ever known was effectively over. Though we never had a clear falling out—one stark, terrible moment when our friendship died—the end result is the same: We have not spoken in years, and I only have the vaguest notion where he is, what he does, who he’s become.

I wish this weren’t part of my story, but it is. I wish this weren’t such a common story, but it is.

The good news is that God has given us a rich cache of scriptures that address this very thing: the fragility of our friendships; the tentative, rickety, makeshift nature of all human relationships. Repeatedly, the Bible calls us Christians to bear with each other, to forgive each other, to make every effort to keep the unity that Jesus died to create. It warns us not to be outwitted by the devil, whose ploy is to have us nurse wounds and bear grudges.

But there’s something else, something more: We’re to see each other as new creations. We’re to see each other not just as we are but as we one day will be.

We’re to see each other from the perspective of heaven.

Between Now and Then

Two women addressed in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi needed that perspective. They have funny names, though common enough back then: Euodia (“Sweet Fragrance”) and Syntyche (“Lucky Chance”). They were once, it appears, close—companions in life, partners in ministry.

But something went awry. Who knows what: a lunch that one hosted and didn’t invite the other to, an admonishment that was ill-delivered or ill-received, a disagreement over Sunday-school curriculum.

Whatever.

The result is that two women who once contended at Paul’s side in the ministry of reconciliation now contend with each other and need reconciliation: “I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to agree with each other in the Lord” (4:2).

But, just before he addresses Euodia and Syntyche and their situation, Paul also addresses the whole church on another matter, seemingly unrelated to the two women’s fracas. What he says provides a rich clue about how to keep our relationships from breaking and how to restore them when they do: View everything through the window of eternity.

Stop fixing your eyes on what is and start fixing them on what is to be, Paul is saying. Quit your fruitless preoccupation with things seen, and foster an obsession with things unseen.

Have the right perspective.

You’re a citizen of heaven, and you’re not finished yet. Right now, not one thing on earth is as it should be. Everything’s tainted. Everything is, at best, provisional. Nothing quite works. This should not surprise or dismay us. The whole creation groans, waiting for you and me to come into our complete birthright, waiting for the day we’re sworn in as full-fledged citizens of the kingdom.

Between now and then, we need perspective. We need to view the broken earth from the glory not yet revealed. That glory at present is hidden in clay jars, in these thin, brittle containers of ourselves and our relationships. One day, in a blink, that will all change. For now, we rehearse the ethics of the coming kingdom; we enact the citizenship code of heaven years before we get there. We learn to act not out of the lowliness that still plagues us, but out of the transformation that awaits us.

In hope of that transformation, in eager expectancy of the one who accomplishes it, we start living here as though we’re already there.

Euodia, do you see this woman? Syntyche, do you? Do see each other from the window of heaven as the new creations you are in Christ? Stop beholding each other from a worldly point of view. By faith, not sight, take hold of the one who is coming, and of the work He will finish once He gets here.

Practice today what you’ll inherit forever.

Even Betsy?

Not that this is easy. It’s messy. It’s hard. It takes discipline and humility to see others as new creations when there is scant evidence to support the claim. Many Christians look more fallen than redeemed. They look not renewed, but shopworn, the same old same old.

And me too. I am man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.

But what are our options? We can keep letting self sabotage intimacy. We can keep falling into the snare of blaming and hiding and withdrawing. We can keep joining Satan as accusers of the brethren.

Or we can take up, here and now, the privileges and responsibilities of kingdom citizenship. We can adopt the perspective of heaven.

I’m learning this slowly, slowly. Maybe the hardest lesson yet was with Betsy. Betsy was in her late 40s and had been a Christian most her life. Yet that was hard to credit. She was a trial: barb-tongued and hot-tempered, with skin both prickly and thin. She was quick to blast another and quicker to wilt when it got dished back.

And Betsy loathed me. She scorned virtually every aspect of my ministry—my preaching, my leadership, my pastoral care, the way I dressed—and this to my face. Who knows what she said when my back was turned?

The truth is, I also loathed her. I wanted her to leave our church. And told her so.

Then God got me. I was cutting the grass one sweltering summer day, meditating on the letter to the Philippians as I crisscrossed the lawn. I was thinking about what it meant to see myself and others as citizens of a place we hadn’t arrived at yet.

Guess who God brought to mind.

Yes, yes: Betsy.

Was she a new creation? Was she a citizen of heaven? Was I enough of these things myself to see her, even her, not for who she was but for who she would be when Jesus was finished with her?

Then God reminded me of something else in Philippians. In chapter 2, just before Paul calls us to have the same attitude as Jesus—humble, servantlike, selfless, obedient, sacrificing—he makes this little remark, subtle and subversive: “Consider others better than yourselves” (v. 3).

I was stunned. I had to stop what I was doing.

“God,” I said, “You don’t mean, You couldn’t mean, that I’m to think this way of…Betsy? Do You?”

He did.

And then God took me through a painful and wonderful discipline. He showed me His Spirit’s work in Betsy’s life, her Christlike virtues—hidden and tiny as embryos—that one day He would perfect and reveal in glory: Her generosity. Her compassion. Her heart for the broken.

That day was an epiphany. It freed me to love Betsy, but not only her. Now, whenever I find myself struggling with someone—my close friends, my wife or children, my enemy—and I find that I’m looking from a worldly point of view, I reenact the discipline of that day. I seek heaven’s perspective.

And it makes all the difference.

Betsy left the church anyway. I don’t know if she still loathes me or even thinks about me. When I think about her, I don’t always love her: At times I’m so earthly minded I’m of no heavenly good.

But there are other times—times I’m heavenly minded enough to be of some earthly good—that I see her from eternity’s window.

And then I’m crazy about her.

 MARK BUCHANAN is pastor of New Life Community Baptist in Duncan, British Columbia, and author of Things Unseen: Living in Light of Forever and The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God (both Multnomah). On his days off, he likes to sleep in. And maybe go fly-fishing.