You are irreplaceable

Don't let any church or workplace tell you otherwise

In Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s book The Courage to Be Disliked,* written as a series of conversations between a philosopher schooled in a particular strain of psychology and a young man with questions and concerns, the philosopher tells the young man, “You are my irreplaceable friend.”

I thought, really? These two people barely know each other. They’ve had a small handful of conversations.

The language of “irreplaceable friend” kind of shocked me. It sounds so intense. It’s something I probably would have only said to a small handful of people, ones I’ve known and felt close to for years.

But as I kept reading, watching the two characters explore this idea further, I realized that “irreplaceable” does not actually mean the same thing as “super, super, super close.” Irreplaceability is different from intimacy. It’s different from intensity.

It simply means “cannot be replaced.” Unique. One of a kind.

And isn’t this true of each one of us, that we are irreplaceable? Each one of us is not exactly like any other—and, therefore, the lives of everyone we know, whether as close as a spouse or soul friend or as casual as an occasional acquaintance, would be different if we were not there.

*I feel like I should note that this book was not at all what I expected from its title. And I don’t think I necessarily agree with most of it. But I was captivated by it nonetheless. And several phrases from it have burrowed their way into my brain, one of which is the “irreplaceable friend.”

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I think about this, and I think about how people are often treated in religious organizations. In the two different settings where I worked in college ministry in my twenties, people above me in the organizational hierarchies were deliberating decisions, making calculations, trying to figure out what was best for the organization.

In both of these organizations, people in the kinds of roles I worked in—ministry interns, ministry directors, usually young, often female—didn’t usually stay longer than a year or two. Sometimes we left because the environment wasn’t a healthy or sustainable one. Sometimes we were forced to leave because our beliefs didn’t fit, or we didn’t fit.

And some of that is fine. People move on. Sometimes a situation isn’t the right fit, or maybe it’s part of our journey but wasn’t meant to last forever.

But I think about the higher-ups in these organizations, and how easy it was for them to watch people in lower positions go. I don’t know if they fully realized that each of us was actually irreplaceable.

When I say I was irreplaceable, I don’t mean anything arrogant by it. I’m not saying I was better than anyone else at my job. I have no illusions of being so awesome and amazing and talented that nobody else could flourish and serve well in the place where I was serving.

But I do mean exactly, literally, that I was irreplaceable. I was a unique human who brought unique perspectives, gifts, and passions to these roles. My work was not better than what someone else would do in my place, by any means. But it was different. It was irreplaceable.

And all the ministry higher-ups saw was an intern, a director, a part-time role, a full-time role. A paycheck needing to be paid. A subordinate needing to be controlled.

Like many religious organizations, they cycled through different interns every year, different directors every year—and something was lost in each of these transitions. The relationships each of us in these roles built were irreplaceable. The trust built with real people and their real lives as we tried to serve them was irreplaceable.

Every time the position turned over, so much had to be rebuilt from scratch. Each of us was an irreplaceable friend to the college students we got to know, and the students were irreplaceable friends to us.

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In the last few years I’ve grieved the deaths of multiple friends in their mid-thirties. That’s way too young. And way too many. (One would have been too many.)

Some of these friends I’ve been closer to than others—but even with the ones who weren’t really in my inner circles, or I in theirs, I feel the loss. I feel the hole in our world where a unique and wonderful human once was, and is now missing.

Whether or not we were close, each person was irreplaceable to me. I feel this clearly, now that they’re gone. I want to feel it just as clearly with those who are still here, because it’s just as true.

Friendship fist bump / Photo by Taylor Smith on Unsplash

I wonder how it changes us and our communities if we learn to see things this way. To view each person we know as an irreplaceable friend—and to understand that we are an irreplaceable friend to them, whether or not they would put it that way.

I think it cuts against how evangelicals often view other people—as objects of conversion, or as people at a specific point on the One Right Spiritual Path who need to be nudged along in particular ways to keep moving and growing.

It cuts against how churches often view people—as volunteers or donors, bodies to fill a pew or fulfill a perceived need, not as creative beings who might discern for themselves how they fit into existing structures or if something new is being born through their presence in the community.

It cuts against how workplaces often view people, which is really how a whole capitalist society views people—as cogs in a machine, little units of productivity whose worth depends on their output, on how much money they’re helping a company make. If people were seen as irreplaceable friends rather than replaceable workers, companies might rethink hours, benefits, sick leave, parental leave, disability accommodations, all sorts of things about the workplace environment.

And it cuts against the way a cruel government views people—for example, seeing immigrants as aliens who must be moved elsewhere, regardless of the cost or the harm, not as humans embedded in and contributing to communities here, irreplaceable members of a society that would not be the same without them.

So here we are. Learning, perhaps, to see one another as irreplaceable friends. It’s all a part of growing into kinship, of learning to see one another as kin. I’m not saying I’m good at it. But I see it was a direction we might move in together.

In this with you. Be safe this weekend.