A Friend Who Changed My Life

It is one of my dearest friend’s 25th birthday today. Her name is Jen Jacobs. And let me tell ya’ll, this is a day to celebrate!!! When a friend’s birthday rolls around, I start to get really consumed with myself.  (Sad, right?  Like aren’t birthdays for celebrating OTHER people?  No, I’ve come to find out everyone else’s birthdays have become all about me.) For example, this is the conversation I had with my husband last night: “Nick!! It’s Jen’s birthday tomorrow. Actually, her GOLDEN birthday. What should I do? What would be the best? Coffee? Take her out to dinner? Wait, I want to make her something. No… let’s take her to one of her favorite desert places… Should I come surprise her at her school with flowers? Golden Balloons? NO I could bring cupcakes to her classroom!” And on and on I went proclaiming all of the things I could do for her. I imagine that’s how God’s love is towards us, so full of desire and affection to let us know how deeply he cares.   Nick reminded me, “It’s the thought that counts- just remembering someone’s birthday means a lot to them.”  I sighed.  “But?!!?”

I am usually consumed with “ME” when it comes to relationships.  I am consumed with how I can perform for my friends.  So celebrating birthdays becomes all about me and not about truly loving and celebrating life with that person, though somewhere in the cloud of my performance is genuine care and love in hopes to make my friend feel thought for and encouraged.  God is so merciful to me in my selfishness!  This is an area I am growing in, and the Lord is revealing more and more that He does not require anything of me in a human relationship but to love and share in the riches of Christ with that person.  I so often get consumed with what I can offer someone when I can look to what God has to offer someone.  He is required to be everything for my friends, not me.  So I can feel really free to celebrate and enjoy my friends when I am with them knowing that their ultimate happiness in life can be far greater met by God Himself.

But there are certain people who have given me so much that I would give them the whole world if I could! Jen is one of those people.  Instead of the whole world I am landing on something quite simple today. Instead of giving her a gift, I want to tell the world about a friend who changed my life.  And let her be encouraged that her laboring as a friend has been such a worthy effort and risk in my life and has overflowed into countless other’s lives.

This could be one long blog post because Jen has been through most of my life experiences up close through the past five years.  I got the joy and delight of being her roommate (of ALL people, God- you chose ME?! ) and the joy of sharing mostly all of my college classes with her.  You can bet we got to know each other pretty well.

In fact, when you get to know someone THIS well, chances are you’ll find out about each other’s weaknesses and realize that friendships take work and at some point giving up becomes an option. But relationships in Jesus Christ are so radically different.  Still full of the same imperfections as in all relationships, yet so full of forgiveness and hope, commitment and love.

Jen has always been an old soul.  Someone who is in this world, but not of this world.  When I met her, I remember thinking exactly that.  She was different. She was truly a light in a crooked generation to me.  A friend that loved and cared more deeply than anyone I had known at the time.

My journal in the fall of 2004 reads, “Dear God, I am so lonely.  Please send me one friend.”

I know, I sound like a sad case.  But I WAS!  I had just transferred to the U of M, with zero real friends and lost in a crowd of about 60,000 people.  Yikes!  I couldn’t think of anything but to ask God to give me what I didn’t have.

About two weeks later, I ran into Jen on the street.  We recognized each other because we actually attended half of eighth grade together at Wayzata Central Middle School- so it was like a six year reunion on Washington Avenue!  Six years had gone by since we had seen each other- and bam!  Our lives collide!  I use to think stuff like that was just “fate” or “random.”  But God would be robbed of so much glory if that were true.  His wisdom and planning are so deeply apart of His character.  Based on what God says about Himself in His word, I don’t believe that God is a random God at all.  I believe He is a wise God whose plans are very high.  The plan of my friendship with Jen began that fall, and my life has never been the same.  Only God could ordain something this far beyond my efforts to “win friends.”  This friend was not won.  It was mercifully handed to me from God.

Jen’s life was changed as a seventeen-year-old girl when she prayed to receive Christ into her heart and into her life.  I got the pleasure of meeting her two years later to hear about all of the amazing things that God had been doing in her since she first believed in him.  I saw something different in her.  There was a freedom, a joy, a sincere care for people, and what pierced me most was to see the deep intimacy that she had with her God.  She was a girl in love with what seemed to be a person, an actual being.  She carried real peace and real purpose in her life.

She embraced me into her life at such a weak and lonely time of mine, and it was just what I needed.  She has always been excellently hospitable to anyone, but she was especially hospitable to me.  She was the kind of friend that made me lunch, had me sleepover, went running with me, stayed at coffee shops too long with me, listened endlessly to me spill out the secrets of my life I had kept hidden for so long.  Truly a friend who stood beside me through anything that I went through.  The bravest thing she ever did for me was talk to me about who Jesus was.  And braver still, she bought me a bible.

She so gently and warmly leaned into my life.  There were times I wouldn’t want to have a friend that knew me so well.  I was afraid to be known for who I was, but once you meet Jen, you know she will welcome you no matter who you are in a heartbeat!  And I learned that I was welcomed just as I was, full of weaknesses, and she was such a gentle ear and forgiving voice to me.

The friendship with Jen ultimately led me to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.  Somewhere in my junior year of college, I truly believed that Jesus was God.  The bible was no longer some old, dusty, “historical” book.  It was God speaking to my heart!  It was God telling me of His love and mercy!

The next few years went by, and Jen introduced me to so many other women involved in Campus Outreach, a college ministry in Minneapolis, where I got plugged in and totally loved on by so many other students and women.  I got to also be friends with amazing women like Samm, Mary, Lydia, Kathy, Holly, Erin… so many others!! I got to watch Jen care about more than just her college education.  She had the courage to ask other women on the campus for coffee.  She loved telling me about the conversations she was having with girls who did not believe in Jesus.  A strange friend Jen was?  Yes, strange.  Christians are very strange.  You’re either drawn to the light of Jesus in them, or you’re not.  I could not resist the power and freedom that seemed to flow like living water through Jen’s life.  I could not go on living without having all the riches that she had found in this God she called Jesus Christ.

So here I am today, by God’s grace and His will- working in college ministry full time.  TOTALLY NOT my life plan!! Would I be walking into freshman dorms and sharing life and Jesus with other women if it weren’t for Jen?  Probably not.  If I had not seen someone consider souls to be such a precious thing as Jen did, I don’t think I would give one rip if people knew Jesus or not.  But it is deeper than a friend just showing me how to give my life away, it is the reality  that now lives deep within me- that I know Jesus for who He really is, the pleasures of His love and kindness He spills into my weaknesses, the love and affection that he has for me though I am so lowly and full of calamity.  I can no longer help this pulsing desire for other women to know this tender-hearted loving father.

This fall, I have been going into the dorms with two women who are seniors in college:  Justine (Jen’s sister) and Brittany .  Both women have been discipled by Jen and other women and have become believers in Jesus through God speaking through Jen.  It just hit me profoundly watching Justine and Brittany walking into the dorms one night.  I had this bird’s eye view of it all.  Four years ago, Justine and Brittany were not walking with Jesus.  Neither was I. Jen gently came alongside all of us at different times and mentored/discipled us. Now four years later, I see their lives radically changed AND filled with desire to give their lives away to other students on the campus.  God has breathed life into these women, and I believe many more women will get to share in this breath of life through Brittany and Justine, and by God’s grace, even through me. All the boasting belongs not to us, but to Jesus.

As I have spent time with Brittany in the dorms, we have both shared with other freshman about the work that God has done in our lives.  The conversations include the gift of Jen’s life to us every time. As my husband and I raise financial and prayer support to work in college ministry, the friendship of Jen is regular conversation.

Jen is now giving her life away as a teacher at Hope Academy, laboring to share the gospel and nurture these children of the city.  Her compassion runs deep because she draws it from the well of Jesus.  His compassion is deep.  Because He loves the children of the city, He has caused Jen to love them too.

Because He loves women who are in college, He has caused Jen to love women in college.  I believe that the gift of her life has radically changed the lives of four women: Me, Brittany, Justine, and Laura.  We will now go out and share our lives too.  And many will see and believe that Jesus is God.

God is relational to our human hearts.  He is close to us because he put on flesh to dwell among us in the person of Jesus.   I am so thankful for a friend as brave as Jen, who loved me enough to share Jesus with  me.  The depth of relationships through Christ is one of the most satisfying, challenging, and rewarding gifts the Lord gives.   It is a worthy risk to go deep in friendships, to work through sin, to be open and honest and let the light of Christ shine and cultivate life-changing bonds.

God blessed me (and still is!) through knowing Jen, and my life hasn’t been the same since!  The labor of Jen’s friendship in my life has not been labored in vain.  She has been the friend that has prepared me the most to work in college ministry by living out her life in front of me.  God showed me that there is a specific purpose and calling on my life too.  Like He would not spare Jen, He would not spare me. And there are many more to be spared.

May God get all the glory for His awesome work in and through this sweet friendship!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEN!