An Older Friend in the Faith

This week on Things Unseen, we’ve been thinking about people who have been special gifts of God to us and the way they’ve helped us come to faith and then grow from being babes in Christ into, at least spiritually speaking, young men and women. And I’ve been talking about some of these people—yesterday about a man dressed in black.

I want to mention another man. He had the very Scottish name of Hamish. I met him through some friends in the church I went to as a teenager. They were all slightly older than I was and took me with them to various Christian meetings and introduced me to their Christian friends too. I know some of them prayed for me to become a believer. And I’m grateful for the way they introduced me naturally to the wonder of Christian fellowship because, like all young Christians, I was a little like the pilgrim in John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress. I needed older companions and their wisdom—people who were already on the way. And one of these was Hamish.

I’ve actually had more than one friend called Hamish, but this was someone I got to know when I was still in my mid-teens and a relatively young Christian. At the time, I had no idea what age Hamish was. When you’re fifteen or sixteen, anyone who’s working five days a week and drawing a salary is, by definition, almost ancient. But anyway, Hamish took an interest in me and talked to me about spiritual things, as I’m sure he did to others. I don’t think he would’ve minded it if I said he was an unusual person. And looking back, I remember he wasn’t a Presbyterian. He belonged to a non-denominational church. I don’t know if he’d ever heard the expression Reformed theology. And he encouraged me to read books that were popular among some groups of Christians in those days—books that, to be honest, were different from the books I tend to recommend to younger people.

But what struck me was his evident love for Christ and his zeal for the gospel, and the way he knew so many more Christians than I did and wanted to introduce them to me because he wanted to encourage me. It all seemed so natural, so organic. It wasn’t a formal mentoring. It wasn’t a program. He wasn’t telling me to take a course in anything. He was my friend. I don’t know if it’s experiences of people like him that have meant that when people have asked me, “Would you be a mentor to me?” I’ve always said, “No, but I will be your friend,” because that’s what Hamish was to me.

When I left home and went to university, I lost touch with Hamish a bit, but years later, I met him again. He’d been involved in a horrific automobile accident. His recovery was painstakingly slow. Physically, he struggled. He was no longer the man he once was. He no longer had the same powers. But two things about Hamish struck me, and they remain with me. The first was the way he almost struggling through his physical weakness, that was the same sense of love and zeal for the Lord Jesus Christ.

And the second thing was this, it staggers me a bit to think about it: he used to come to hear me preach. I don’t know if you can imagine what that meant to me, that someone who had seemed so far ahead of me, so much older in every way, would come and as they used to say in Scotland, “sit under my ministry of the Word.” Like some people you maybe know, Hamish had a way of looking at you. He was hungry for the bread of life. He wanted to be fed from the Word of God, and it still moves me to think about him.

When I first came to the United States to teach in a theological seminary, I made it one of my aims whenever a student I didn’t know came to see me, I made it my aim to try to find the answer to this question: Who has invested themselves in this young man’s life? Sometimes the answers made me think that perhaps what I thought was just normal—the organic friendship of an older Christian showing genuine Christian friendship without strings attached to a younger person—I began to wonder if that wasn’t so normal after all. I began to wonder if I’d had something special. But it should have been normal. And so, it saddened me to think that there might be men going into the ministry who had never known that normal that I’d known. So, I’m tremendously thankful for Hamish and for his friendship.

Perhaps you’ve also got a Hamish to be thankful for today. But whether that’s true or not, maybe the lesson Hamish teaches us all is best summed up in Jesus’ words at the end of the parable of the good Samaritan: “You go and do likewise. You become a Hamish to somebody else.” May the Lord help us all to be such men and women.