Friendship is a special heartfelt attachment between two or more people. It is a trusting relationship between people, based on selflessness. It is a personal emotional and spiritual bond. It is mutual affection, respect, and love within a relationship.
Friendship may include common interests, but it may also exist without them. In that case, the other person’s choices and preferences are taken into consideration.
Friendship is a very familiar concept describing personal relationships between people.
Many stereotypes imposed by society have created a certain image of friendship in people’s minds. They dictate its rules and shape their own trends and laws.
There are as many opinions about friendship as there are people, because everyone has personal experience with such relationships. Based on that experience, each person forms his own understanding of who is a friend, who cannot be one, who fits that definition, and who has no chance of ever fitting it.
Friendship, like love, can be either one-sided or mutual.
In any case, no matter how friendship is defined, it is universally regarded as something positive and necessary in human relationships.
However, the nature of my personal friendship depends on the extent to which I understand and envision such relationships in my own life. If I am firmly convinced that friendship must exist within certain boundaries, I will not be able to cross those boundaries. I can broaden my understanding of friendship only by studying the subject and accepting truths that are new to me and that convince me they can become a reality in my life.
If I define friendship as a conditional relationship limited to certain actions, I will regard any step beyond those boundaries as arrogance or betrayal and will eventually break off the relationship.
Conditions in friendship are probably the most destructive mechanism, ready to destroy everything once they are set in motion.
I know many such examples from my own life and from the stories of those close to me. I see how often this happens. As a result, a person is left alone with memories of how many friends he once had. But were they truly his friends?
Loneliness comes, and with it comes sorrow. Memories of my former life among friends brighten my dull everyday existence. I look through old photographs and grieve over the past. What changed? Why did I lose everyone? I changed, and I can do nothing about the fact that my situation has become so discouraging. Yet I cannot allow myself to destroy my understanding of friendship, because then I would cease to be myself.
And when your close friend dies, a part of you dies with him. I understand that a tragedy has taken place in my life, something I cannot change. The pain in my soul pierces my heart, and I must go on living with it.
But life continues, and something must be done, something must be built, and something must be learned.
I have often attended funerals, and I am always amazed by how many people come to see someone close to them on his final journey, to say kind words beside a closed casket, and to remember all the good things that connected them with that person. Every time, I wonder why so few people said those kind words to him, visited him, or spent time with him while he was alive. Then he could have appreciated it all, and those words would not have been spoken in vain. But while a person is alive, there is no time to spend on those who do not mean very much to you.
Every one of us must live with such a burden of knowledge and ideas without understanding how to break free from these bonds. We have mastered many fields of knowledge, learned how to earn and spend money, become able to distinguish evil from good, and discovered many things for ourselves. Yet in the end, we are left alone with our knowledge. And if there are exceptions, they are based on certain circumstances and rules that I am still willing to follow.
The world lies in sin, and sin has destroyed every good thing that God has given us. In order to survive somehow and preserve a reasonably joyful life for myself, I begin inventing things for myself or looking for communities built around shared interests.
When I first read the book of Ecclesiastes, I was amazed by the wisdom and insight of its author. Then I concluded that this man must have been suffering from severe depression. Only later did I understand that Solomon was instructing those who might 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 was the conclusion of the wealthiest man. It is worth listening to him.
Understanding all these lessons and problems, I decided to look for something better—the very opposite of all this. I wanted to find it now, while I was still alive and able to think and analyze.
I began asking God to give me an understanding of true love, happiness, and friendship. I was not satisfied with the conditions imposed by my own mind; I wanted stability in these matters. I desired to discover what I did not understand, because I had no true picture of what our relationships should be like. I began earnestly pleading with God to reveal this mystery of love and friendship to me, and He began answering and teaching me.
As it turns out, friendship is an entire field of knowledge, governed by its own laws and relationships. It is very closely connected with love and truth. It is impossible to speak about friendship apart from love or from Christ and present it as something independent and complete. That would be like cutting off a head and claiming that the head itself is the entire person—a center of influence that does not depend on the rest of the body.
Jesus is the Author and Architect of every right relationship. If Christ is absent from a relationship, it will be wrong from the very beginning, because wherever Jesus is absent, sin dwells, and sin either destroys or offers a counterfeit.
If I say that true friendship does not exist and that it must be conditional, I misrepresent God by confining Him within subjective limitations. And if I consider something impossible, I will never desire to do it or even attempt it.
For example, I believe that it is physically impossible for me to overturn a loaded truck, so I will not even try. The same thing can happen in my understanding of friendship. For instance, when I hear that friendship between a man and a woman is impossible and I believe it, I will not even try to take any steps in that direction. Why should I? After all, it is impossible. Yet when I study the Bible, I do not find such an understanding there. This means that someone has succeeded in convincing me of something that has no biblical foundation.
I know of many situations in which this is exactly what happened—friendship ended with the breaking of the seventh commandment. But this does not mean that friendship is impossible. It means only one thing: the concepts and understanding of friendship have either been distorted or are completely absent. In such a case, the flesh writes its own rules, and I begin living by them. Then it truly becomes impossible to fulfill God’s will while living by the laws of sin.
The enemy of souls has a rule: he distorts everything God has said and presents it in a false light. He distorted the concept of love by turning it into sexual immorality. He replaced friendship with something conditional and sentimental. He perverted the meaning of happiness by replacing it with consumerism. But God possesses Love, Happiness, and Friendship, and He desires to teach me these things. After teaching me, He desires to teach me how to share them with others.
Bible Verses for Reflection
Proverbs 17:17; 18:24; Colossians 3:15; 1 Peter 3:8; 2 Timothy 3:2.