I'll be your friend...

Last week I had the enormous delight of meeting up with one of my closest friends from years ago whom I have somehow not seen for ten years. You know how it happens, and yet at the same time it is not clear how it happens.

Anyway, it was a delight to meet up and the time passed all too quickly.

It has set me thinking, though, about what friendship is. Specifically: is it something rooted in the self, in the other, or in the relationship, and can we generalise?

I am quite convinced, you see, that most of what we call friendship is nothing of the sort, really. It is mere aquaintance and familiarity. Many ‘friends’ are simply the people who happen to be in the same place or places that we are. Facebook illustrates this perfectly, where the 4,567 people whose names you know on-line are all ‘friends’ when many of them are nowhere near that close. There’s nothing wrong with this, in fact there is an awful lot right with it. We are called to love those around us, and that is expressed most commonly in everyday friendliness and freindship.

Real friends, though, are not merely people we know. They are those we would travel to see, whose children we would care for, or whose preferences are a delight rather than a burden to us. They are those to whom we have a lasting allegiance and for whom that is mutual. There is affection and mutuality in the relationship, but as soon as we try to pin it down, at least as soon as I try to pin it down, it slips away as a concept.

To return to my question, though, where does this reside? Is a friend a friend just because you decide they are? Or is there something about the two of you that would mean you were friends whatever? To what extent are two friends who have not met for years still friends? What happens to the friendship in the periods of absence?

These are big questions, but the truth is the experience of friendship is profound and life-shaping. They are picked up after times away, remoulded with changes of circumstance, and sustained through the turbulent patterns of life.

Of this I am sure; it works because God created us with friendship in mind: with each other, but also, of course, with Him.