Made for Friendship: The Relationship That Halves Our Sorrows and Doubles Our Joys

by Drew Hunter

Technology can hinder friendship in four ways. First, it often depersonalizes communication.

Second, technology can disengage us from real communion.

Third, technology disembodies conversation. When we engage in person, we experience our friends in unrepeatable and holistic ways. We notice her expressions, intuit her moods, and learn her quirks. Embodied friendship is full of dynamic, real-time, give-and-take interaction. In contrast, digital communication doesn’t demand much more than fingers to flit around a keyboard.

Finally, technology creates dependence on less personal ways of addressing personal issues.

Soon we can hardly muster the courage to say anything

difficult in person. And without the reassuring eye contact, gentle tone, and responsive clarifications, we often end up adding complications rather than clearing things up.

Friendship often requires lots of time together. But

Friendships take time because roots don’t go down quickly.

Keeping our roots on the surface makes it easier to transplant with the next move. But without deep roots, our relationships cannot grow strong. So, as busyness, technology, and mobility have increased, friendship has faltered.

Churches often talk about community, which is good. But they don’t often talk about friendship, which is not good. We encourage community in general, but we forget friendship in particular.

question, we need to examine an assumption that keeps friendship in the background. Many modern Christians inherited a way of thinking that buries it

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you”—noting that this “may be, at least obliquely, anti-friendship.”23 Why? Because friendship is exclusive, particular,

and preferential, while the call to Christian love is all-inclusive. Aren’t Christians called to love everyone, not just a few? Whether or not you’ve heard it put quite like that, this assumption often keeps friendship in the shadows of Christian love.

According to Jesus, no love exceeds friendship love. He says, essentially, “Love one another as friends, just as I’ve loved you as friends.” Friendship love is, therefore, an essential part of Christian love. Far from being at odds with Christian love, friendship is a central way in which we live it out. Christian love and true friendship belong together;

should feel no ultimate tension between the two: Christian love expresses friendliness

to all and enjoys friendship ...

Top Five Regrets of the

back. She heard several recurring answers. One of the greatest regrets of the dying? “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” She explains:

friendships the time and effort that they deserved. 25 In our final weeks, a lot of what we now care so much about will quickly evaporate. But relationships will remain an immovable priority. Because, in the end, “everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”26

Each one of us will eventually step into our final week. Some of us will know when we do. If so, we will take a thoughtful glance backward. And we won’t wish we had put in more hours at work. We won’t wish we had taken more extravagant vacations. We won’t wish we had spent more time staring at a screen. But we will wish we had spent more time with our friends. Because, as we’ll see next, friends are among life’s matchless necessities.

the most? Why? 2. Why is it particularly

week to strengthen each friendship?

test

We have few friendships, because we are not willing to pay the price of friendship. . . . The secret of friendship is just the secret of all spiritual blessing. The way to get is to give. Hugh Black

But I’ve learned that friendships—good friendships—require cultivation.

Similarly, without cultivation, friendships either wither or become unruly. Sometimes we may even feel like giving up.

we cultivate better friendships? True friendships take wisdom, they take work, and, in a fallen world, they take weeding.

Wisdom is about living well in the world. We grow in wisdom as we see how God designed life to work, and then we adjust to fit with that design.

Let’s consider four of them.

One myth that keeps us from enjoying friendship is that we’re too busy for it. It may be true that you are too busy for friends. But that doesn’t mean you should be. We always make time for what we treasure.

but if we promote our friends in our priorities, we will find space for them in our schedules. This will often involve sacrifice.

Third, maybe you don’t have to move. C. S. Lewis wrote to his friend, “If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’

for most of us most of the time. We’re often forced to move due to family needs or work changes. But if friendship really is as great as Lewis and others say it is, then shouldn’t it at least factor into the decision? Maybe we should sometimes turn down a bigger paycheck if it means we have to move away from the people who contribute so much joy to our lives and in whom we’ve invested so much time and effort.

Take a Dose of Realism Here’s another myth about friendship: we can have a lot of very close friends. If friendship takes time, and we only have so much of it, then we won’t have enough to share with everyone. This shouldn’t discourage us; it just means that good friends are like the best meals. A Thanksgiving

spread looks great, but you can only fit so mu...

If we try to collect too many close friends, we’ll end up with no close friends at all. When I planted too much too close together, my whole garden turned into an unruly wasteland. In a similar way, we can’t be too close to too many people—not because it’s wrong, but because it’s unreali...

We shouldn’t feel bad for being unable to draw everyone into our closest circle of relationships. We can appreciate everyone in our lives, yet the sacred bonds of friendship will only form with a small percentage of them.

Does friendship come with responsibility? We may not have thought much about friendship entailing commitments, but we all know that it does. We imply it when we say, “I thought we were friends.” Or when we think, I could never do that to my friend. We sense it in David’s lament in the Psalms,

Friendship also requires flexibility.

Many friendships also change over time. Sometimes friends change lanes. People move from the left lane to a middle lane, or from a right lane to an exit. This doesn’t contradict the previous principle—that friendship entails commitment.

It’s true that friendships often begin without effort. But that’s not how friendships endure. Starting a marathon doesn’t take work, but finishing it does.

“I know one thing—for two people to be true friends, it takes work and sacrifice.” Relationships thrive when we’re intentional about friendships in four simple ways.

Talking Face to Face First, friendships flourish when we talk together, especially face to face. One of the best gifts life offers us is unhurried conversation with close friends. Thomas Goodwin put it this way: “Mutual communion is the soul of all true friendship; and familiar conversation with a friend has the greatest sweetness in it.”5 Some ways of communicating strengthen friendship ...

our friendships. Phone calls move us a bit closer because they allow more of our personality, more of who we are, to come through. Best, of course, are face-to-face and eye-to-eye conversations. When the apostle John wrote to his friends, he wished that he didn’t have to. “Though I have much to write to you,” he wrote, “I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to...

hundred letters.”6 Nothing replaces the value of embodied conversation, yet messages, letters, and

phone calls keep us in touch with distant friends. My brother Trent and I live in different states, and we only see one another a couple of times every year. We mainly keep up through talking on the phone a couple of times each week. If something really big happens to one of us, we pick up the phone. If one of us has a particularly hard couple of days, we pick up the phone. He would be dumbfounded if he first heard about a big life change from someone else instead of from me. But talking openly is even more important than talking often.

The best conversations happen when both friends ask thoughtful and personal questions.

Conversations drain us when one person is either too dominant (always talking but never listening) or too passive (always listening but never contributing). Both approaches—yammering on or never engaging—reveal a lack of love.

If you’re always active in conversation, but you only share interesting (or uninteresting) details about your life, you won’t have deep friend...

never ask about anyone else’s life, you won’t have deep friendships. Conversation thrives with the give and take of two practices: en...

How can each of us deepen our conversations in friendship? Here are a few practical ideas: Getting Practical