Comforting Friends In Broken Relationships

I'm certainly not a relationship expert. While I've had some very good and fulfilling relationships, I've also had my share of broken relationships. Such is life. Sometimes such brokenness results from simple lack of compatibility, or from a failure of appropriate communication, or from tough life circumstances (and sometimes a combination of some or all of those). Other times it's more serious, such as in situations of abuse (emotional or physical) or infidelity.

I've been thinking about brokenness in relationships recently because I discovered that quite a number of my friends are having some pretty serious relationship issues of varying severities. And these are all friends I care about very much, and whose pain, frustration, anger, and disappointment is pretty palpable.

And so I wonder: what can I do, as a caring friend, to be part of bringing some comfort to them? How do I help create even a little Oneness in their lives when they are experiencing difficult moments of brokenness?

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Afterlife, Heaven, Hell, etc.

The first century Stoic philosopher Seneca put it best when he wrote, "What is death? Either a transition or an end."

When we truly force ourselves to be self-honest, we can't escape the two obvious truths of that maxim. The first truth (a speculation, really) is that consciousness either will or will not continue after we die. The second truth (actual truth) -- and the one that's probably most unnerving to many -- is that we ultimately don't know.

And as any quick look at any of the world's major religions will reveal, that unknown has arguably been humankind's most singular philosophical and existential distraction throughout the ages.

In my case, I grew up in Christian traditions which actually had conflicting views on the afterlife. The first was your typical Christian notion:

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A Christian of a "new kind"

For almost twenty years I always told people: "No, I am most definitely not a Christian."

There's good reason for this: Christianity has a horrible reputation. It's toxic. And I didn't want to be associated with it in any way, especially after my terrible experience with church growing up.

But more than this, I also struggled for years with a number of other issues. Not only was I sickened by the cancer of corruption, hypocrisy, hatred and elitism that has infected a great many Christian communities, but I refused to embrace the doctrinaire approach to faith, and the insistence on fitting into a strict box of conformity by which Christians measured your worthiness to be part of their special group.

My friend Vince Donnachie of Reading City Church in Reading, PA, recently wrote a post on his church's blog titled "Redefining Church" that does a great job of identifying some of the reasons why a lot of modern churchgoers, himself included, have trouble embracing the label of "Christian":

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