A Friend Named Duffey by Andy Harrison
I am a cryer. I will start with just getting that out of the way. I wouldn’t say that I cry over everything; dogs and babies do not hit the soft spot for me. I will come back to this if I am feeling brave at the end.
There are a lot of reasons I applied for this program over a year ago now. Here I will speak of just one, and for the sake of privacy, I will change his name to Duffey. My relationship with Duffey, metaphorically put, was the soil where any interest in the integration of faith and work or faith and culture grew from. I learned to engage with someone who was different from me. A lot of my relationships admittedly are easy, convenient, and comfortable, which is the product of just hanging out with people who are similar to me. This is a slight exaggeration to emphasize where I am heading; nevertheless, my relationship with Duffey was a new kind of relationship.
Duffey looks kind of like you may think a Duffey would look like. He is average height, a little wider than most, and has really crazy blonde curly hair. He wears glasses and says cuss words in random situations. He makes self-deprecating jokes, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and he would agree with me that he probably drinks too much. I met Duffey while working with him when I was in college. I had been working at this particular job for awhile at the time, and I had seen a lot of different faces come in and out; however, there was not another like Duffey. He quickly became one of my favorites amongst the other employees. I was very fond of his sense of humor, and I could tell early on that he was a deep thinker. He always asked good questions and was a good listener. As we became better friends, it became clear that we had very different world views. I, a Christian and he (to put it simply) an atheist, had formed a friendship.
This is not all we talked about though, we loved to dream big and talk about the future. He was very knowledgable when it came to beer, so I tried to encourage him to open a craft beer bar.
I always said I would do it with him even though I knew next to nothing about beer. We talked about his girl problems, and we talked about how I couldn’t get a girlfriend. I talked about my friends and he talked about his friends. He loved Coldplay and that was the only band I had heard of out of all the other artists he listened to regularly. Duffey’s friendship for me felt different, and it had hit a soft spot.
Earlier this week the Fellows discussed Christ and culture. We asked questions and dialogued with each other. As the group was conversing I could not stop thinking of my friend Duffey.
Recently, I have felt like I’m in a wrestling match with Jesus. It’s a familiar spot. I try and put God in a box and he busts it open and leaves my pride in his wake. My inability to understand the entirety of who God is scares me, so my inclination is to dumb him down to a place where I can understand him and his creation. Because of this I fear I have been looking at such a narrow view of what the Lord is doing. By drawing the imaginary sacred/secular divide my picture has been distorted. God created the world and everything in it to glorify him, and in particular humans where created in his image. I, often with arrogance, think of myself and Christians as being needed to bring this Glory to God. I put myself on this pedestal as if I have anything more to offer than my own need for grace and mercy itself. This is not to underplay the role of the church and the beauty of the Christian community, but for me, coming to an awareness of my humanity and taking the spotlight off of me and on to Christ is a necessary process. I think of the way in which I view the world and it reminds me of a character in the Gospel of Luke.
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
I imagine you understand which character I am referring to.
What I haven’t told you about Duffey was he would pick up any shift you put up. He would speak the most genuine words of encouragement over everyone. He was a hard worker, adored by customers and staff. Duffey cared about people, all people. Duffey was honest about his shortcomings and aware of his brokenness. Duffey was smart, he could quote philosophers for days. He would go pick up food for the crew and pay for everyone’s meal. He would do anything you asked him to do, and he would be overjoyed just to help. He loved others better than he loved himself.
The only way I could describe it is Duffey still carries the scent of his creator. He may not know where it comes from, but I do. He was created to bring flourishing to this world the same way I and my fellow Christians are. I am not sure if Duffey will ever know Jesus, but I know Jesus a little bit better from knowing Duffey. My last day on the job before I moved to Nashville I broke into tears thinking of Duffey. Our friendship has had a profound impact on me. I chose the Fellows Program because of the lIfe that our relationship gave me. A secular man, an atheist, was the most Christ-Centered relationship I had in seven years before coming to Nashville. I think this is true because for the first time I began to have the posture of the tax collector.
“God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Thank you, Lord, for using Duffey to continually remind me of this. There are more Duffeys out there that have so much to offer us. I pray we look at the Duffeys in our lives and thank them for being them, and thank God for putting them in our lives.
