No, I’m talking about the Trinity (magnificent and mysterious as they are, they aren’t all fully human anyway). When I was in high school one of my good friends told me about a youth group session they had at her non-denominational Christian church about Saint Paul. What she told me years ago has stuck with me – nuggets of wisdom that we learn from Saint Paul even today.
Saint Paul
Barnbas is the person who is on par with us, this is the person in whom we confide, who knows our secrets, and the person whose advice we seek on a regular basis. This person, more or less, is our equal. One might say this is your best friend, but your “Barnabas” should go deeper than that. Your “Barnabas” should be someone who shares the Faith, who journeys with you, someone who encourages you and you encourage them. This relationship is one that is mutually beneficial, one in which you both learn from each other. This person goes beyond the simple “this is what I did with my day…” topics, but really gets at the heart of you. Sure, you can have conversations about events and surface-level things, but your “Barnabas” can, and often does, get to the core of who you are, what makes you tick, etc. There is a big difference between an acquaintance or a friend and a “Barnabas”, a big difference between a friend of convenience and true brotherhood, or in my case, sisterhood
Timothy
We need each of these roles in our lives. If you find yourself lacking one or another, or are unsure as to who fulfills these roles in your life, pray that God would give you the eyes to see who they are. Ask Him to send you a person to fill that gap in your life for each of these roles works together: Paul challengs us so that we can challenge Timothy while Barnabas keeps us strong and lets us know that we are not alone. In some ways it is like the relationship between the Trinity (haha look I tied it all together!) on a human level, it is a community, a communion we are invited to live in. Often times over the course of our lives these roles change, the person who was my St. Paul yesterday may not be my St. Paul today. Sometimes your Timothy becomes your Barnabas, sometimes your St. Paul becomes your Timothy. Sometimes you will have more Timothys than you do St. Pauls (this tends to be my case simply by the merit of being a youth minister). Just because things and roles change doesn’t mean we don’t need at least one of each of them for they all call us, in their own way, to pursue holiness.