Wisdom for Everyday LifeSample

Forging Great Friendships

What if the most significant thing you did with your life wasn’t an achievement you attained but a friendship you formed?

Finding and keeping great friends is an indispensable life skill too often taken for granted. In a world that feels ever more polarised, transitory, complex, dislocated, and in need of deeper connection, we need to build friendships that will help us to become more like Jesus. Friends multiply joys and divide sorrows. They are shock absorbers for our difficult days, and they enhance our best days. It seems, however, that it’s harder than ever for people to find friends.

Proverbs tells us that if we hang out with wise people, we become wise too, and that, conversely, hanging out with fools never works out well! That means friendship isn’t neutral, but influential. The company you keep crafts your character. Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future. The quality of your friendships significantly impacts your resilience, coping mechanisms, and ability to absorb the pressures of life. Physiologically, friendship impacts us on a cellular level and should be viewed on par with how much smoking or drinking can affect our bodies. It can even increase your protection against stress and disease. It’s worth thinking about the five people with whom you spend the most time because you’re likely becoming more like them. (Is that a good thing?)

Proverbs also teaches us that a person with many companions may come to ruin, but there’s a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Research suggests our potential for connection is limited to 150 people. Jesus had twelve close friends and only three very close friends. Social media and global movement make the early stages of friendship easy, but deeper connections are more challenging, and our friendships tend to be widespread but shallow. To forge meaningful friendships that sustain and strengthen us, we need to choose our friends wisely and commit to side-by-side time spent together, sharing interests or experiences. It’s also good to be aware that people generally want to be around us when things are going well. Success gives us many companions. When hard times hit, we find out who our true friends are.

The writer of Proverbs tells us that wounds from a friend can be trusted. That’s because, while friends can call out the gold in us, they can also offer helpful feedback. Our friends should feel free to point out our blind spots, and we should be grateful – not offended – when they do so. Even in fantastic friendships, misunderstandings, and miscommunications happen, and we need God’s grace and wisdom not to pick up an offence but to forgive.

May you be wondrously aware of the truth that Jesus calls you His friend. He treated you as a friend when you were His enemy, even giving up His life for you so that you could be empowered to find and forge great friendships. You weren’t just saved from something; you were saved for something: friendship with God and others.