by Brian Rutherford
In high school, I wanted the Journey greatest hits cassette.
I lived in a small town, and you could not get it easily. So when a friend of mine was headed to the mall, forty-five minutes away, I gave him cash. He went to the record store while he was there doing whatever else he was doing, and he came back with my cassette and my change. Then I put it in the player.
Last week I downloaded a song in about four seconds.
I am not here to tell you the cassette was better. The four seconds wins on every practical measure. But something happened in that whole operation, the cash, the friend, the wait, the drive, that does not happen anymore.
I think we are losing more than we realize.
We have come to believe, almost without noticing, that friction is a bad thing and the good life is the frictionless life. An entire economy has been built on removing every small resistance between you and what you want. You can order almost anything with one click and have a car at the curb before you find your shoes.
The problem is that the best things in life come with friction. A meaningful family trip is friction. So is asking someone out, or getting off the couch to play basketball instead of watching someone else play it on TV. Sitting with a grieving friend is friction. Marriage is friction. Prayer, most mornings, is friction.
And this is the season of friction.
Over the next six weeks, you are going to hear your congregation talk about almost all of it: the travel, the in-laws, the brother-in-law’s politics, the aunt who asks the same question four times, the cooking, the cleanup, the expense, the exhaustion.
Then, somewhere around January 2, some of those same people will quietly wonder why the holidays did not feel the way they hoped.
Here is the question I want to put in front of you as a church leader: what if the friction is the holiday? What if the parts your congregation is dreading are the very things they are longing for?
The uncomfortable drive to a grandparent’s house is not the obstacle between a family and Thanksgiving. It is Thanksgiving. The same goes for the hour spent peeling potatoes next to a mother-in-law and the awkward conversation with a cousin whose life has gone sideways. None of that is the price of admission to the holiday. It is the holiday.
A thousand small conveniences have trained us to treat resistance as a defect. Jesus taught something different. He told the people following him to expect a narrow road, a cross to carry, and a cost to count. Friction was never a bug in the life he called us to. It was part of the design.
Something gets lost when we smooth the friction out of the holidays, and I think it is love.
Love costs something. It shows up in the forty-five minute drive, the extra hour in the kitchen, the conversation you did not want to have. Take the friction out and you have not made love easier. You have made it smaller.
So this Thanksgiving, when the complaints start, try not to argue with them. Help the people around you see what they are complaining about. The drive, the potatoes, the cousin. That is what loving each other looks like for a few days in November.
I am going to try to remember that with mine.
If you want a more structured way to do that work, the Radical Alignment Assessment (alignmychurch.com) gives your team a common framework to rate where you actually are — together — before you talk about where you're going.