Friendship is a special heartfelt attachment between two or more people. It is a relationship of trust between people, based on unselfishness. It is a personal emotional and spiritual fellowship. It is mutual affection, respect, and love in a relationship.
Friendship may include common interests, or it may have none. In that case, the choice and taste of the other person are taken into account.
Friendship is a very familiar concept concerning personal relationships among people.
Many stereotypes imposed by society have created a certain image of friendship in the mind. They dictate rules for it and shape their own tendencies and laws.
There will be as many opinions about friendship as there are people, because each person has his own personal experience of such relationships and, on the basis of it, forms his own idea of who is a friend, who cannot be one, who fits this definition, and who has no chance at all.
Friendship, like love, may be either one-sided or mutual.
In any case, however friendship may be characterized, it is generally acknowledged to be something positive and necessary in communication between people.
But the distinctive feature of my personal friendship is that I will be a friend to the extent that I understand and see such relationships in my life. If I am convinced that friendship is confined within certain boundaries, I will not be able to cross those boundaries. And I can broaden my understanding of friendship only by studying this question and accepting truths that are new to me and that convince me they can be embodied in my life.
If I characterize friendship as a conditional relationship within the limits of certain actions, I will regard going beyond those limits as insolence or betrayal and will subsequently break off such a connection.
Conditionality in friendship is probably the most destructive mechanism, ready to destroy everything when it is set in motion.
I know very many such examples from my own life and from the stories of those close to me. I see how often this happens. And as a result, a person remains alone with his memories of how many friends he once had. But were they truly friends?
Loneliness comes, and longing with it. And memories of my former life among friends brighten my grey weekdays. I leaf through photographs and grieve over the past. But what changed? Why did I lose everyone? I changed, and I can do nothing about the fact that my situation has become so depressing. Yet I cannot allow myself to destroy my idea of friendship, because then I will cease to be myself.
And when your close friend dies, a part of you dies with him. And I understand that a tragedy has occurred in my life that I cannot change. The pain of the soul pierces my heart, and I have to go on living with it.
But life continues, and it is necessary to do something, build something, and learn something.
I have often attended funerals, and I am always surprised by how many people come to the service to accompany someone close to them on his final journey, to speak kind words beside a closed coffin, and to remember all the good things that connected them with that person. Every time, I wonder why, while he was alive, so few people spoke these kind words to him, visited him, or spent time with him. Then he could have appreciated it all, and these words would not have been spoken into the air. But during his lifetime, there is no time to spend on those who do not mean very much to you.
And each of us has to live with such a store of knowledge and ideas, without understanding how to break free from these bonds. We have mastered many sciences, learned how to earn and spend money, become able to distinguish evil from good, and discovered much for ourselves, but in the end we have remained alone with our knowledge. And if exceptions do exist, they are determined by certain circumstances and rules that I am still willing to observe.
The world lies in sin, and sin has destroyed every good thing God gave us. And in order somehow to survive and preserve a more or less joyful life for myself, I begin inventing things for myself or seeking communities based on common interests.
When I first read the book of Ecclesiastes, I was amazed by the wisdom and insight of its author. Then I decided that this man was suffering from severe depression. Only later did I understand that Solomon was giving instruction to people who would wish to experience what he himself had already experienced. The wise man summed up his life and called it vanity, or emptiness of emptiness. Such is the conclusion of the richest man. It is worth heeding.
And so, understanding all these lessons and problems, I decided to find something better and opposite to them. I wanted to obtain it now, while I am alive, while I am able to think and analyse.
I began asking God for an understanding of true love, happiness, and friendship. The conditional ideas of my mind did not satisfy me; I wanted stability in these matters. I desired to discover what I did not understand. After all, I had no idea of the true picture of what our relationships should be. I began earnestly asking God to reveal this mystery of love and friendship, and He began to answer and teach me.
Friendship, it turns out, is a whole science in which its own laws and interconnections operate. It is very closely connected with love and truth. It is impossible to speak of friendship apart from love or from Christ and to present it as something independent and whole. That would be like cutting off a head and saying that it is the person, that it is the centre of influence and does not depend on the rest of the body.
Jesus is the Author and Architect of every right relationship. If Christ is not in it, it will be wrong from the outset, because where Jesus is absent, sin lives, and sin destroys or presents a counterfeit.
If I say that true friendship does not exist and must be conditional, I will present God in a false light, restricted by subjective boundaries. And if I consider something impossible, I will never want to do it, not even wishing to try.
For example, I consider it physically impossible for me to overturn a loaded truck, and I will not even try to do it. The same thing may happen in my understanding of friendship. For instance, when I hear that friendship between a man and a woman is impossible and believe it, I do not even attempt to do anything in that direction. Why should I? It is impossible. But when I study the Bible, I do not find such an understanding there. This means that someone succeeded in convincing me of something that has no biblical foundation.
I know of many experiences in which this is exactly what happened, when the entire friendship ended in the breaking of the seventh commandment. But this does not mean that friendship is impossible; it means only one thing: concepts and knowledge of friendship have either been perverted or simply do not exist. In that case, the flesh writes its own rules, and I begin to live by them. Then it certainly becomes impossible to fulfil God’s will while living by the laws of sin.
The enemy of souls has a rule. He perverts everything God has said and presents it in a distorted light. He has distorted the concept of love, turning it into sexual promiscuity; he has substituted the concept of friendship, making it conditional and sentimental; he has perverted the concept of happiness, replacing it with consumerism. But God has Love, Happiness, and Friendship, and He desires to teach me these things and, having taught me, to teach me to share them.
Homework 127
What new things did you learn from this lesson? Is friendship a normal part of life for you? Do you understand the difference between conditional and unconditional friendship? Give a couple of examples of friendship described in the Bible. Do you have friends whom you love at all times? Do you have friends who love you at all times? Are you interested in learning the secrets of true friendship? Please read Proverbs 17:17; 18:24; Colossians 3:15; 1 Peter 3:8; and 2 Timothy 3:2 in the light of our lesson.