I’m reminded of the power of healthy friendships and how they infuse life into our discouraged hearts. With friends, life is invigorated with breath and hopeful in outlook. Without friends, life becomes suffocating, hopeless, and nondescript. Friendship involves sharing privileged information and is like fuel added to an empty tank. Friendship is also proven and enriched during times of crisis.
In his book Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, author Jon Meacham recounts the deep friendship that developed between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II. Interesting, Roosevelt had quite a negative impression of Churchill when they first met twenty-one years earlier. Roosevelt was running for a state senate position and made a visit to London. He found Churchill brusque. What brought them together years later as president and prime minister was Adolf Hitler. However what kept them together was friendship.
Throughout WWII, they exchanged nearly 2000 letters, spent over 100 days together, and celebrated holidays with one another. They encouraged each other in the midst of dark times. In the last 24 hours of Roosevelt’s life, he penned these words for a speech that he would never deliver: “Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships.” [I’ll resist the temptation to discuss the lack of friendship and collegiality, which characterizes the political atmosphere in Congress at present. However, I do wonder if friendship is one of the missing ingredients in solving our nation’s problems.]
In his book, Sacred Companions: The Gift of Spiritual Friendship and Direction, David Benner ponders if the reason friendship is so undervalued today is because “too few people have ever experienced a significant, enduring friendship.” He maintains that spiritual friendship reflects love, loyalty, honesty, intimacy as shared experience, as well as the critical balance of support and confrontation. Who can show us ourselves unless someone is close enough to really know us?
Prior to his death and resurrection Jesus set friendship up to a new level of relationship when he told his disciples, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command…Instead, I have called you friends, for everything I have learned from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15:13-15). Jesus called those closest to himself friends and left them a legacy of friendship.
Genuine friendship is becoming an endangered species. Yet as Liz Carmichael asserts in her book examining friendship in the classical tradition, Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love, “it [friendship] is the enduring element in all loves” (p. 179). Carmichael looks at the original writings on friendship of the likes of Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, John Cassian, Aelred of Rievaulx, Thomas Aquinas, and Moltmann, among dozens of others.
Despite social networking sites (i.e., 800 million active uses on Facebook and 106 million users on Twitter), investing in friendship is thwarted by busyness, work overload, economic distress, and media consumption. Jürgen Moltmann said of friendship: “In friendship we experience ourselves for what we are, respected and accepted in our freedom. Through friendship we respect and accept other people as people and as individual personalities” (The Church in the Power of the Spirit, p. 115). How true this is!
I’m thankful for my closest friends who know all about me and still love me. Since friendships die from neglect, I’m challenged afresh to invest in them, especially over this busy holiday season perhaps, by giving the gift of time. A note…a phone call…a prayer.
What about you?
Tags: friendship, holistic formation, love of God, relationships
Thanks for the words of wisdom. Could this message of relational caring also be applied to the body of Christ? And if so, would we become more successful, by example, in spreading the love of God in Jesus Christ both within and without of the wider church? The vulnerability of true friendship is all too scarce in today’s society. Just a thought.
Blessings,
Frankie
Frankie, thank you for your reply. You offer a powerful question about relational caring applied to the church, the body of Christ. As you suggest the church serves as the heart, hands, and feet of Jesus in the world, offering the love of God in all spheres.
I’m reminded of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who explored Christian love in his writings culminating with his masterpiece, Summa theologica. Aquinas argues that love (Latin caritas after the Greek word agape) is amicitia (Lat. friendship) based upon John 15:15. In his early commentary entitled Sentences, Aquinas writes: “It seems that caritas is the same as amicitia…But caritas has most superabundant love, which indeed is why it is called ‘caritas’, inasmuch as it values the beloved at an inestimable price as though they were the dearest thing. Therefore caritas [love] is the same as amicitia [friendship].”
If love is embodied in friendship, then what does this say about how we relate to our friends (those within the body of Christ and those outside the body of Christ)?
Appreciate your thoughts, Frankie~
Dr. Chandler,
This is very convicting! I am very social and easily develop friendships but then will go on to new relationships (call me, “Mr. Woo”!) and not allow time to drive the relationship deeper! This is not right! I am aware of this and wish to have a solid base of friends that know they can call on me and, likewise, I can call on them!
God has been putting many people in my life of late, especially in the wake of the storm of this past six months. I am so thankful for each and everyone one of them and for those who were there prior to losing my dad and sister on May 22nd and 24th. Knowing our personality makeup is very important in order to cooperate and also, to combat so that we can be in Jesus’ likeness and love as He asks us to love!
Thank you for your words! They are very weighty and worthy of deep consideration!
In Him,
carey
Carey,
What’s interesting to me is the enduring quality of friendship. For example, when children grow up, they become friends with their parents. Prior to marriage, an engaged man and woman should have grown in deep friendship, where the friendship deepens over time. When friends disconnect because of time, distance, and circumstance, what continues to connect them is friendship.
I’m increasingly aware that friendship is the essential and sustaining element of our lives. We may lose a parent, a sibling, a spouse, or a dear friend. But the quality of the relationship (the friendship) remains and can continue to sustain us over time through appreciation of their deposit in our lives. In friendship, we are known and know others. And the beauty of friendship is that our unique personalities are the raw material for scultping our relationships ~ yours and mine.
God is the ultimate friend because in God is the perfected reality of friendship ~ the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in perfect unity, love, and caring within and extending outward. So God’s friendship with us engages us with God and to one another.
God is our friend and I know that over this holiday season God will draw close to you and your family, Carey.
Wow…well presented to challenge me to understand that friendship is SO crucial to our lives. Thank you Diane…I want to be a better friend to you and all those I am honored to call friends. Rita
Rita,
I, too, am challenged afresh to appreciate the gift that God has given me through friendship both with the Lord and with others.
God offers love and friendship to all who will receive God’s grace in the person of Jesus Christ and allows us the privilege of sharing God’s love with others. Although friendship carries with it a seed of exclusiveness, God’s love is inclusive. While it is easy and natural to guard our friendships and become selfish (i.e., the dark side of friendship), godly love expressed in friendship opens wide the door of hospitality, possibility, and hope.
South Africans have a glorious term, “ubuntu,” that refers to being-human-in-community and extending compassion, being generous, and making oneself available to others. Friendship requires time and effort. But it is so worth it.
Francois Fenelon (1651-1715) warned about depending too much on human friendship at the expense of our relationship with God. He wrote: “The renouncement consists of loving them only for God’s sake, of using the comfort of their friendship seriously, according to our need, of being ready to lose them when God takes them away, and never trying to find in them our heart’s true rest” (from his book, Christian Perfection, p. 183).
So thankful for friendship,
Diane
What interesting facts about Frankin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
We know that Jesus had three close friends Peter, James and John. Could it be that Jesus gave us an example about how many close friends to have? No more than three (good friends). Proverbs 18:24 says “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother.”
I believe, we as Christians, have to learn what the Bible says about being a friend and about friendship and choosing your friends wisely. Do you know of any Bible study that teaches this?
Do you believe that some people come into your life for a season and some come into your life for a lifetime?
I am continually seeking wisdom on friendships and not only on how to be a friend but how to respond to your friends and acquaintances with honesy and sincerity.
Cheryl,
Thank you for your comments and questions.
You mention that Jesus had three close friends in Peter, James, and John. Although I don’t believe that Jesus was prescribing how many close friends to have, what we might take away from His example is that among a small group of people, we cannot be equally close and intimate with everyone.
What creates such intimate bonds in friendship? Perhaps there are several factors such as common interests and calling but also complementary personalities that seem to attract to each other.
You mention about looking at what the Bible says about friendship. Truly, we cannot find anyone who embodies friendship better than Jesus (i.e., John 15). And if we all approached relationships/friendships within a biblical perspective reflecting depth of commitment to work through conflict, perhaps we would not be so relationally fractured.
You ask about some books that might be helpful. The very best resource on friendship is the Bible, with Jesus as our example. Friendships such as that of Jonathan and David and Ruth and Naomi are full of lessons about godly love, commitment, and personal sacrifice. Let me suggest a few other resources below as possiblities:
Books by Christian authors:
(1) Sacred Companions: The Gift of Spiritual Friendship and Direction by David Benner (published by InterVarsity Press, 2002),
(2) Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoffer (truly a classic on Christian community),
(3) Making Friends and Making Them Count by Em Griffin (published by InterVaristy Press, 1987; this book is written by a communications professor),
(4) The Friendship of Women: The Beauty and Power of God’s Plan for Us by Dee Brestin (published by David C. Cook, 2008)
(5) Here is a recently published book that I’ve not read yet but hope to soon: Practicing the Way of Jesus: Life Together in the Kingdom of Love by Mark Scandrett (InterVarsity Press, 2011).
A Secular Resource:
(1) Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without by Tom Rath (published by Gallup Press, 2006). When you purchase the book new (not used), there is an assessment that you can free assess online for related to friendship. The access code is in the inside back flap of the cover.
I hope that these resources might prove helpful.
Thank you again for your contribution to this Blog.
Diane