Friendship

Friendship is the last fleeting sign of childhood dreams. It is the final symptom of youthfulness that lingers around the shadows of our adult minds.

It reminds us of chosen love. Chosen love is unlike family love in that families love one another out of acceptance. Friends, on the other hand, choose one another. This kind of love develops like barnacles on a ship; slowly over the course of time. It emerges without warning. There is no date of establishment to be remembered or celebrated. Most friendships have no real reference point as to the time or date when an acquaintance graduated into a friend. Love and loyalty are the diplomas awarded on such auspicious occasions.

Friendship is real and it is powerful. It is idealistic and capable of dreaming the biggest of dreams. It is iridescent enough to shine through the fog of an aloof world that has somehow forgotten the value of friendships and no longer values love and loyalty.

Average people rarely encounter a real friendship in the course of a lifetime. All to often, people travel through this life having made only acquaintances. One reason for this is that most people today are far too selfish to be a friend. You see, friendship is like riding in a Greyhound bus. In order to allow others on the bus, we must be willing to scoot over and sacrifice our own comforts as well as rearrange our perspectives. We must be willing to not only accommodate our friends, put their baggage as well.

Real Christian friendships require work. Citizenship in God's kingdom is not a simple matter of birthright. It is advanced citizenship. You have to want it bad and be willing to work and suffer for it. You must be willing to struggle with others and forgive them. You have to be willing to look past their imperfections and occasionally see them as they can be and not as they are.

The church is commanded by the Hebrew writer to assemble itself together. A more vivid translation of this might say that we are to join our lives together. This kind of communion in God's family cannot be achieved by mere acquaintances.

Real friendships glorify God. Being involved in real friendship is a Christian's destiny. We are told that the world will know that we belong to Jesus, the lover of the unlovable, by the way we create bonds with one another. So let's work on being loyal. Let's make it our business to overlook faults. And together, let's dream big dreams and teach the world about Jesus by our friendships with one another.