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

by Drew Hunter

Think about what to ask people when you’re on your way to meet

with them. What do you want to find out about? How can you encourage them? Grab a meal or coffee with someone. Schedule this time together monthly or every other week. Consider discussing the Bible or a book together when you meet. Talk about spiritually significant topics. Ask what your friend is reading in the Bible or in a good book recently. Ask how they are encouraged or discouraged in their life of faith right now. (If you aren’t in the habit of having these types of conversations, it might feel awkward at first. Do it anyway, perhaps acknowledging to your friend that it may feel awkward.)

Use your drive home from school or work or the store to catch up with a distant friend. Even if you only have three minutes. And if you don’t reach them, leave an encouraging voicemail. Add four or five friends to your phone’s speed dial list so that you can call them more easily more often. Think about someone to whom you often write messages, emails, or letters. Instead of writing, ask them to get together or, if they’re far away, call them.

Doing Things Side by Side Second, friendships feed on shared experience—life on life and side by side.

Near the end of his ...

author John Stott was asked, “When do you feel most alive?” How would you answer that? Here are the three things that made him feel most alive: public worship, enjoying nature, and human friendships. “I’m grateful to have many friends,” he said, “and very grateful to have the opportunity to enjoy their friendship, and to do th...

A large part of friendship consists of simply doing...

Of course, in order to “do things” together, we hav...

comes around. Rather than watching alone, I invite friends over to watch the game together. What shows do you watch? Do you go for walks? When do you go to the store? Invite a friend into these activities. The

best way to create space for closer relationships is to establish rhythms.

Find your own friendship rhythms. Establish rails for your relationships to ride along over the long haul.

Friends do things together. It’s not complicated. And the best part of friendship is not the doing but the being. When you’re with good friends, just being together is more important than whatever it is you’re doing.

Getting Practical If you plan to watch a movie or sports, invite a friend over to join you. Save a certain show for watching with a friend or in a group. With the next book you plan to read, invite one or more people to read it and to meet a few times along the way for discussion. If you’re a parent with young children at home, invite someone to join you on a walk or a visit to a park. Ask a friend to help you with a home-improvement project, or offer to help your friends with theirs.

Regularly exercise, work out, or play a sport with someone. Ask a friend to go on a walk together. Make it a weekly or every-other-week rhythm. Develop your own annual traditions of camping, heading to a city with friends, or enjoying a concert. If you’re married, make a plan with your spouse for how to help each other cultiv...

Friendships thrive when we eat together.

Throughout history and the world, wherever we find strong community,

we also find shared meals at the center of it. Why? Because one of the main reasons meals exist is to enrich relationships. A central theme in the Bible is that of a joyful feast in God’s presence. God’s first command to Adam was to eat from all of Eden’s trees (Gen. 2:17). In the Old Testament, people also typically ate together when making a covenant. After Israel’s exodus from Egypt, their leaders climbed Mount Sinai and “they beheld God, and ate and drank” (Ex. 24:11). Then God brought Israel into their land and commanded them to rejoice (commanded to rejoice!) over meals in his presence (Deut. 12:18; 14:26; 27:7)...

What’s with all the food? Friendship. Food changes things.

A meal around a table. Instead of rushing into our discussion, we first enjoyed talking around the table (or on the couch or the floor or wherever people found a place to sit). Every one of us eats about twenty-one meals each week. Why not share a few of these with friends? Make this one of your relational rhythms. One man I know meets with friends for breakfast every three or four weeks, and they’ve been at it for forty-eight years.

Getting Practical Pick one breakfast slot each week and invite a different friend to join you each time. As you leave your church’s Sunday service, invite someone out or over to

Keep one evening open each week to invite someone over for dinner. If you have younger children, invite someone over for dessert after your children go to bed. Or invite a friend to join the dinnertime fun and to stick around for family Bible reading and prayer.

Encouraging from the Heart

Encouragement is relational oxygen.

That’s how every relationship feels in the absence of much affirmation and encouragement. But when we encourage one another, it’s like thickening the air with oxygen. As oxygen is to our lungs, encouragement is to our souls. Oxygen gives life. Remove it, and we die. Proverbs says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Prov. 18:21). When the atmosphere is thick with affirmation, friendships thrive. But when it’s thin (or when it’s thick with criticism), they wither.

These friends remind me of the apostle Paul. I often think of Paul as an evangelist or a theologian. But he also lived as a man of friendship, and he filled the atmosphere of his relationships with affirmation. Sometimes he adds a final section of greetings at the end of his letters. He often adds personal side comments to the names he lists.

For example, at the end of Romans, Paul greets twenty-eight people by name. He thanks Prisca and Aquila, who “risked their necks for my life” (16:3); he calls Phoebe a servant (v. 1), Mary and Persis hard workers (vv. 6, 12), and Apelles approved in Christ (v. 10); he calls four of them “beloved.” What’s with all the public affirmation? Oxygen.

Affirmation will feel out of place in a relational culture where sarcasm, competition, and comparison are the norm. But what does it feel like when encouraging words replace those?

feels like a church I visited a few years ago. Affirmation was a palpable part of the culture. Romans 12:10 marked their relational tone: “Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.”

Affirming others will initially feel uncomfortable if you aren’t used to it. But the more you encourage, the less

One of the best ways we can encourage friends is through written notes. I have several notes saved in a drawer that I’ve pulled out to re-read for encouragement. I have a file on my computer for particularly thoughtful and kind notes. I know others who do this as well, and they find ongoing encouragement from re-reading them over time.

Getting Practical Here’s a principle to live by: whenever the thought crosses your mind to affirm something about someone, do it, and do it without hesitation.

Sometimes, before you say goodbye to friends, say why you’re thankful for them. Let them know you love them a...

When you mention people’s names in conversation, create the habit of adding a comment about why you respect them. On a friend’s birthday, write a thoughtful and encouraging letter to the...

Each of these practices—talking, doing, eating, and encouraging—takes work. The two best ways to integrate these into our li...

First, with rhythms, we turn these ideas ...

When we set patterns in our lives, we no longer rely on our whims; we build them into our schedul...

Second, creativity keeps things personal and fresh.

Pulling Weeds

I often thought about Genesis 3:17–18: “Cursed is the ground because of you; . . . thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you.” Just as

prickly weeds cover the ground, relational weeds infest our friendships. Cultivating true friendship entails pulling these weeds up by the roots. The sages who wrote Proverbs warn us to look out for three of them.

1. When Your Blessing Sounds ...

First, beware of inconsiderateness. Proverbs compares singing songs to a heavy heart with taking someone’s co...

When someone weeps with sorrow, our cheery smiles d...

Proverbs also warns, Whoever blesses his neighbor with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, will be counted as cursing. (27:14) Friendly greetings are nice. But too much too loud, and before our friend has coffee, is rude. In each of these cases, these aren’t the actions...

We should also avoid causing friendship fatigue. Proverbs says, “Let your foot be seldom in your neighbor’s house, lest he have his fill of you and hate you” (25:17).

isn’t saying that we shouldn’t spend significant time with our friends. It is saying we shouldn’t smother them.

2. How Not to Sharpen Your Friends Proverbs also promotes gentleness by warning about strife. “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” (Prov. 27:17). Many have understood this to mean that two people help each other become wiser—we knock off rough edges through thoughtful dialogue. That kind of mental sharpening is certainly good. But that’s probably not what this particular verse means. The sharpening here is not a good thing. This pictures relationa...

And think about the image here: to sharpen iron, one piece of iron was put in the furnace to soften, then another iron hammer beat it until it became sharp. This is a negative image, and we find it in the context of a number of negative relationship images. In light of this, Ron Giese summarizes the verse this way: “Just as a hard iron hammer pounds soft iron into something sharp, ready for battle, in the same way a man causes his neighbor to go on the attack.”8 The implication? Don’t provoke people to anger.

Do people put up their defenses around you? Perhaps it’s because you speak offensively around them. Maybe you like to “speak your mind,” make fun of friends, or you’re easily agitated. If so, you may prepare people’s faces for battle rather than friendship. Proverbs 12:18 says that our “rash words are like sword thrusts.” Rash words are thoughtless critiques, passive-aggressive responses, and sarcastic remarks. A pattern of sarcastic speech doesn’t feel like sword thrusts to people, but more like incessant paper cuts. In some friendship groups, it functions as an expected form of friendly joking. Sarcasm used to be the way I expressed affection to people. But sometimes my remarks hit too close to home.

My sarcasm didn’t fit the standard of “only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those