Call me clueless, he said,

I read your blog.  Congratulations on selling your house.  I’m wondering if you are serious about cutting other ties to where you sold your house, like our friendship.

Call me clueless.

I’ve been thinking about you and wondering what the heck went wrong with our relationship.

Call me clueless.

I have known you for about a decade, all the years good from my perspective until you apparently wanted to end the relationship for reasons unknown to me.  Was it the time I proffered, watch your ego?

Call me clueless.

I know.  We are not creatures that take kindly to advice, especially when not requested. But I thought a decade would help weather the storm even if such a storm  blew in hard from the west across Lake Michigan or perhaps just from your eyes and into my face.

Call me clueless.

You just sat there, shook your head no and said what you do, you do for Jesus and in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Was it my frown of doubt?  The storm must just have churned inside.  Do you practice that hide?

Call me clueless.

I hate investing that much time in a relationship just to have it end abruptly.

Call me clueless.

That is to say, perhaps I could understand the ending if I understood the reasons. Was that it?  The caution, the warning, the look out/watch out?  What is it I’m not understanding?

Call me clueless.

Why do I feel that you can so easily just kiss a friendship goodbye. Is it that way with others, too? Is there history here? You’d think I’d know after ten years. You’d think,

Call me clueless.

and if that is the case, why does that disconcert me besides the fact that no decade long relationship should end so glibly?  Are you that callow of a fellow at your age?

Call me clueless.

I told someone that you apparently just cut off the relationship and he simply asked, “Well, what is friendship, anyway?”  Nicely put, Socrates.

Call me clueless.

My question exactly.  Others have asked why I would even bother.  They say for all those years it was all about you, no two-way street in the town of our time together.

Call me clueless.

I thought I was being a mentor. Then, I thought we had moved into friendship. There were clues along the way they say.

Call me clueless.

You preach love, compassion, forgiveness, justice, peace and yet, when it comes to practicing such things with someone who was a friend for so long they seem to fly out the proverbial window.   Intimacy issues?  I’m groping in the dusk or dawn not dark here.

Call me clueless.

Perhaps it is easier to write a newspaper article about those Jesus things than to be those things in the flesh and blood with another person.  Where did incarnation go, long time passing?

Call me clueless.

You get a by-line and I get a good-bye line.

Call me clueless.

You get a photo in the paper and I get shoved out of the picture.

Call me clueless.

Apparently, I have a harder time leaving friendships behind than you do and as a result, I’m feeling very vulnerable, opening myself up to another rejection from a friend of all those years, but it is a risk I am willing to take,

Call me clueless.

if for no other reason than, I believe Jesus calls me to take it, the Jesus who befriended us all and made us friends of all but doormats of none. Eyes wide open.

Call me clueless.

After all these years, I would like to know something one way or another either to keep the relationship going or regretfully to say goodbye to the runaway guy.

Call me clueless.

In either event, I wish you nothing but the best (Yeah, I’m not being exactly truthful) as you seek to follow the way of peace and justice. I leave you with another of your sayings from your blog:

“Surprise! When you are present, you are a gift.”

Don’t call me clueless.

Just call me sad and, in all honesty, a little mad, but this, too, shall pass and I’ll get on with getting on because I think that’s a calling, too, he said.