Made for People: Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship

by Justin Whitmel Earley

“A friend is someone who knows you fully and loves you anyway.”

It is a great working definition.

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue.

Philia [the Greek word for friendship] which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that Amicitia [the Latin word for friendship] on which Cicero wrote a book.

Aristotle, Cicero; now speak.

You cannot have a real life of faith without friendship.

covenant friendship as a way to explicitly name the idea that we were made to be fully known and fully loved over the long haul.

Thus our first two arts of friendship: vulnerability and honesty.

To be fully known.

The second part of this definition is that Jesus remains committed.

Thus the third and fourth arts of friendship: covenant and forgiveness.

Thus the fifth art of friendship, invitation.

three arts of friendship: geography, time, and communication.

We close with two final arts of friendship: memory and worship.

For me, college brought all the usual temptations, at least of the flesh.

What was significant was that I faced all these temptations alone.

Do you want to know the loneliest way to live? Living with sin and hiding it.

Grace means that your hidden failures are not the end of your story. They can be the beginning of friendship.

The heart of the gospel of Jesus, after all, is that Jesus sees us clearly and loves us dearly.

happy. On the contrary, being known and loved anyway is the path to happiness, salvation, real life, and real friendship.

That was the time when I stopped just “knowing about” Jesus and started following him.

following him coincided with being known and being drawn into community.

Vulnerability was the doorway to new life because vulnerability is the door...

Part of what it means to be human on this side of the fall is to be comfortable with hiding and pretty good at it.

Instead, the question we asked each other was, “Is there anything you aren’t telling me?”

You can be friends with someone for a long time and never really allow them to push you into a corner of honesty with such a question: “Is there anything I need to know?” Or, “Is there anything important you’re withholding from me?”

The word vulnerable means to be capable of being wounded.

To be fully known without being fully loved is to be exposed. (And to be loved without being fully known is really to be hidden.)

But to be fully known and still be fully loved, that is the b...

Being made for people means that you’re made to be friends with sinners.

This means that vulnerable community is the only real version of Christian community.

You cannot have real community without real vulnerability.

Living as a body of believers is not hiding but confessing.

The grace of Jesus is nothing to rejoice about if we cannot first be honest about why we need that grace!

One commonality that ran through the conversation was our feeling like we were not enough. Not enough to make our wives happy. Not enough to finish all the work of the family. Not enough to figure out the next step in our careers. Not enough to get the sleep we need or the time off we feel like we should take.

We just spent time trading inadequacies, confessing—in the most informal but authentic way—that life is mostly hard.

Through the grace of God we warded off, for one more day, the poisonous lie that ruins life, the lie that says, “You are fine on your own—you don’t need others. You’re better than them anyway.”

It was about experiencing the presence of those who are also inadequate and therefore feeling adequate to carry on.

“If we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be ‘as gods.’ We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us.”

You will see this path in every real friendship. To move up, you first have to move down. Because the way down is the way up.

The act of being specific in your confessions—which we will call vulnerability—is the act of strengthening friendship.

Sharing is what we do to update people on our lives. But vulnerability is what we do to let people into our lives.

Knowing comes from vulnerability. Sharing is about what happens to us. Vulnerability is about what happens in us.

Vulnerability is a type of sharing; a special type of sharing. You cannot be vulnerable unless you're ready to share. Sharing is the means, the way and the gateway to being vulnerable. Being vulnerable means having a specific sharing pertinent to your particulate nature that if known can hurt. Sharing is the way, vulnerability the manner of sharing.

It may be true that vulnerability cannot happen without sharing, but sharing can certainly happen without vulnerability.

And the hallmark of being human is this: flaws.

People who tell everything all the time to anyone who will listen push other people away rather than bring them closer.

The truth is a scary and sacred thing. Share it wisely. Boundaries should exist.

But I am suggesting that vulnerability should come at some regular time to some regular people.

So of course you are not telling everyone everything, but you must be telling someone everything. Because vulnerability is the catalyst of friendship.

“We need to talk.” This, too, is a hallmark of vulnerable friendship—it interrupts.

It is one thing to tell the truth at the beginning. It is another thing to tell the truth after you have been hiding or lying or faking it.

Of course you are afraid to tell your secrets.

This is the great paradox of friendship: What we hide pushes people away. What we share draws them in.