Life Giving Friendships
Friends *hums tune* How many of us have them? If you’re of a certain age, you get it. For everyone else, that is a line from the 80s hit Friends by the band Whodini. Outside of the catchy hook, the song offers a commentary on various kinds of relationships and the meaning of friendship. It opens with these lines:
“Friends
Is a word we use everyday
Most the time we use it in the wrong way
Now you can look the word up, again and again
But the dictionary doesn’t know the meaning of friends
And if you ask me, you know, I couldn’t be much help
Because a friend is somebody you judge for yourself”
This song gets to the heart of something we all need: Friends.
I believe we need a better theology of friendship. The majority of our sermons, writings, and speeches on relationships tend to focus on the marital relationship. We unintentionally set the expectation that the only life giving, truly fulfilling relationships we can have in this life are to be found in marriage.
We urge our daughters to dream of their wedding days and push our sons to aspire to be good husbands. These are good and right things to want for our children, but it operates under the assumption that they will indeed one day be married. We tell them to long for the day they meet the one who will complete them, but we fail to prepare them for what life can be like if they never meet that person.
In his commentary on Proverbs, David Atkinson poignantly stated:
“It is very surprising how little ‘friendship’ seems to feature in contemporary Christian thinking. One can look through dictionaries of ethics and theology, and find plenty on love and on sex, but little on ‘friends.’ But when we place this alongside the way the fourth gospel speaks of Jesus’ relation to his disciples, this is perplexing. ‘I have called you friends,’ he says. The word for ‘friend’ is closely related to the way St. John speaks about love, and is contrasted with slavery. ‘I no longer call you servants, but I have called you friends’ (Jn 15:15).”
Jesus sets a high bar for what friendship can and should be, but we ignore that as though we can be above the life Jesus lived. Our present theology of friendship tells us that friendship is second rate and pales in comparison to the one true relationship: marriage. No one would ever outright say this, but it is implicit. Sermon series on relationships will focus on marriage, dating well, and singleness but rarely take a good, long, hard look at what it means to be friends.
This is why people start dating and leave behind the friends who have been there from day 1, only to come back in a puddle of tears when the relationship ends. What happens often in marriage is that people soon realize their spouse’s inability to fill every relational void in their lives and they miss their friends.
Our present theology of friendships tells us that we can only be friends with people of the same sex because to have opposite gendered friends is dangerous and can lead to bad places. This causes us to miss out on the beauty and perspective of our opposite sex friends that we desperately need to inform our worldviews. This leaves us only going to men’s bible studies and women’s bible studies, sectioning ourselves off from one another.
I completely understand the wisdom in good boundaries between men and women. The problem is, these often start from a place of suspicion and objectification that does not value nor honor the image of God in the other person. Men and women were made to complement each other in more than marriage. We learn valuable wisdom and truth from one another that we are unable to gain from our same gendered friends.
Our present theology of friendship tells us that all of our friends should be like us. We attend churches where everyone is roughly the same age as us, work similar jobs to us, and have our same interests. We drill down even further by finding small groups that fit our particular affinities. We miss the goodness that comes from having a diverse smattering of friends. There is immeasurable benefit to having friends of a different race, socioeconomic level, skill level, and age from ourselves.
If we only rely on our limited perspectives, we are looking through a foggy window. Sure we can see but our vision is obscured. It is when people with different vantage points are allowed to look through the window with us that our perspectives are broadened. I am grateful for the older men and women in my life who constantly talk me off the ledge. They have lived long enough to speak wisdom to me that I just can’t see from my present location.
Our present theology of friendship is nearly non-existent. Where is the space for us to learn how to be friends? How can we learn to emulate Jesus and his relationships, or Paul and his, or Jonathon and David, or Ruth and Naomi if we don’t take the time disciple our people in this crucial category?
How We Got Here
The last 3 or 4 generations have been discipled by Romantic Comedies and dramatic love movies, these movies reinforced the Hollywood created dream of The One. At the same time, Sitcoms and weird rules around what defines a man, taught boys that sharing their feelings with each other isn’t manly. All of this is compounded by the way we have evolved as a society. We spend more time with our faces in our phones than we do with other humans. The last 60 years have slowly eroded the foundation of good friendship.
The most pernicious thing is how this mindset has seeped into the Church. We leave little space for organic friendship to form. All of our interactions are these awkward scheduled events in the hopes that if people bump into each other enough, then they will magically form a soul level connection that will carry them through life.
It’s not that easy. Making friends as an adult is hard. Really hard. Competing schedules, jobs, families, just being plain tired all get in the way of us being able to put in the time with people that you need to form deep friendships. I once read in an article that it takes 100 lazy hangouts to create that bond. That is hanging out every day for just over 3 months. Nobody has that kind of time anymore and yet this is what we need in order to get to a place of comfortability with people so that we can go deep with them.
Wired for intimacy
We don’t value friendships because we have been taught that marriage is the ultimate prize. On a recent episode of HBO’s Insecure, Molly said to Issa: “This relationship is really important to me and I want to protect that.” Molly and Issa had been experiencing some friction but had been friends nearly their entire lives. In the midst of their conflict that neither one was too keen on solving, Molly decided she needed to protect her relationship with her new boyfriend over her lifelong friend. Molly showed something that is true of so many of us: we don’t value friendships as relationships.
We are wired for intimacy. This is a desire placed inside of us by our Creator. We long to be fully known and fully loved. This is what Adam and Eve enjoyed with God before the fall; pure, unadulterated intimacy. Sin broke that and the effects have trickled down to us. We now experience broken intimacy both vertically and horizontally.
Disordered desires cause us to look for intimacy in the wrong places. We settle for shallow substitutes that don’t come close to the real thing and just leave us craving for more. Madison from This is Us put it this way when talking to Kate about what she wants: “Letting people see the worst part of you without being scared.”
Her deepest desire, like many of us, is to be fully known and fully loved. She thought the only way she could get that was in a man but she failed to recognize it was right there in front of her, in the form of her best friend.
Good Friends
We need people we can show the ugliest parts of ourselves. People who will judge us and tease us when they see those parts yet love us anyway. Some people will never be married and statistically, many who are will go through a divorce. Therefore the answer cannot be that these people just won’t get to experience life giving relationships.
There are 59 one-another commands in the New Testament. I believe a large part of their design is to usher us towards intimate relationships. Jesus tells us to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14), this is an act of true humility and vulnerability. Paul tells us to be devoted to one another in brotherly love (Romans 12:10), devotion means we will prioritize our friends and not treat them like the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th options in our lives. He tells us to carry each other’s burdens (Galatians 6:2), in order for us to do that, it takes a certain level of trust, care, and commitment to each other.
We are not meant to be alone but being with someone is more than sharing a bed together. There are plenty of people who sleep next to someone every night and are still alone. Obviously there are unique benefits to marriage that even the best friendships can’t give us. Deep friendship can be just as fulfilling albeit in different ways.
In deep friendships we find joy, laughter, sorrow, faithfulness, someone to trade kicks with (or is that just me and my best friend?), and so much more. You can find people who will be there with you for life, by your side, until the very end.
While we should experience all of those things with our spouse, they were never meant to be our only friends. The expectation for your spouse to fill every role you need in a friend is an unfair, burdensome obligation that they were never designed to carry. No single person was meant to carry that load for you. I have been to many weddings where it was declared that your spouse will “complete” you. This is a lie that only sets you up for disappointment when you discover they are human, just like you and unable to fill that role.
Lord knows I understand that adult friendships are rare. It’s easy to retreat to the familiar or to hole up alone in our little silos (my preferred method) but we desperately need each other. We need friends from all across the spectrum to help inform our lives and our walks with Jesus.
Good friendship will always point us back to Jesus. In the end, this is about Him, like everything else is. Faithful friendship models the example our savior set before us. We long for the day of a new heaven and new earth where we will gather as friends to worship the King who sits on the throne.
Until then we enjoy life with friends. We go deep with them and share our souls. We value people in our lives who can share so much more than a bed with us and we honor them for that.
Friends *hums tune* How many of us have them?