If you are just jogging along in life, and you start to notice your friends are becoming a little distant, do you evaluate? If those who have been consistently supportive and faithful begin absenting themselves from your presence, do you ponder? If someone who loves you and desires your best approaches you with concerns, do you self-check? What if your most devoted friends are suddenly no longer available? Not going to help you move, not going to keep your kids while you have surgery, not going to spend twenty minutes over a lousy cup of coffee. Perhaps you find yourself increasingly alone, or left only with those who are weaker, less mature, or not really attached; your community is composed of the sycophantic, the parasitic, or the psychologically unstable. Perhaps everything of real value is beginning to slip through your fingers. Or perhaps you are throwing it away with both hands. Perhaps it is time to hold an intervention on your own behalf.
Dear friend, you have chosen a path which I and others who love you cannot support. You are choosing this way of the will above your community, your reputation, and your very salvation. You have relinquished your strength to another, becoming weak and ineffectual, blown about by every wind of doctrine. You are choosing to live a lie, and present that lie as a covering for your sin. You are choosing to hide - and thus enable - grievous sin in others, to the great harm of the innocent. You have turned from the light that once filled you, and are stepping into waves of darkness.
And so, Beloved, fellowship between us must be broken for a season. I will always love you, always encourage your best self. I will be nearby as you traverse this wilderness, but I will not follow you into it. As you pursue your stiff-necked, willful way, I will prowl the side roads and hallways of your house, anointing your doors with tears and prayer. When you at last repent, I shall rejoice greatly. In the meantime, I pray that your influence will be constrained, the damage you do will be minimal, and that soon you may be found clothed, and in your right mind. May God have mercy.
