Become a friend

To make a friend

Thanks for patiently waiting for this final post in a series about friendship. I’ve been traveling, speaking, writing an urgent essay about speaking up for immigrants, sitting alongside grieving friends, even rustling up some new cool ideas for connecting with you, including an optional monthly round-up of this kind of news. Stay tuned!

Without further ado…

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Traditional time management advice is simple: as Alan Lakein put it in his 1973 book, How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, you will either drift, drown, or decide. So: decide already.

There’s more than a little naivete in Lakein’s assumptions. Anyone who has lived a truly human life knows we exert very little control over the days. As I wrote in my last book, we’re not deciding our lives so much as receiving them, in all their unplanned contingencies.

Time, like life itself, is a gift, and we can’t count on there being more time tomorrow. Sure, let’s plan and prioritize. Let’s even write a rule of life for living deliberately and faithfully. But let’s also realize that today’s plans might be interrupted suddenly, even tragically.

Be still and know that you are not God.

It feels important to critically examine this emphatic advice to decide, especially in a world where so many unseen forces act upon us. If only we existed in this airless vacuum of personal agency, where decisions could be made without coercion and conditioning. But this is not human life in the 21^st century.

The reality of our context and its pressures seems important to grant, especially as you and I look to decide to prioritize friendship. When you feel like friendship is hard in this moment, when you feel exhausted by the efforts you know friendships demand, understand that some of your inner resistance to friendship, rival to your desires, has been constructed by forces external to yourself.

Few, if any of us, enjoy the kind of community that Eudora Welty describes in her early 20^th-century childhood, growing up in Jackson, Mississippi. (I understood there were many problems in a segregated city like Jackson, in the deep Jim Crow South, so trust that I’m not idealizing here.)

In One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty describes the look and feel of afternoons on her street, when mothers would leave their houses, knock on doors, visit, and leave behind calling cards. Visiting was a pastime, and no one considered it odd or rude for a friend to arrive without a scheduled appointment. Homes were social spaces; communities were places to be known. Friendships could be woven into the fabric of the everyday.

I think of those women, children in tow, clucking the town’s gossip as they went door to door–and it almost feels as if I’m describing life on an alien planet. Few of us can afford the time for such regular gathering, least of all working parents of young children who must, in the crush of the late afternoon hours, get kids to practice and dinner on the table.

This is a simple example of how deciding for friendship is not so simple or straightforward as deciding. Of course, you can and should decide for friendship, organizing your days and weeks to make space for people you care about. If you can work less, great. If you can involve your children in the making and sustaining of family friendships, wonderful. Take time and show sufficient courage to learn toward the risk of connection, even when it feels scary and time-consuming.

Still, the question remains: will others decide for friendship in similar ways? Will others similarly make space and time? The efforts of friendship must be collective, as many important actions are. We need larger social change here!

But here is one thing I think all of us can decide, when it comes to friendship. We can decide to be a good friend. You can’t materialize a friend out of thin air, but you can become the kind of person ready to be a friend, when another comes along.

Isn’t it interesting to think of all the advice we get these days: about staying clear of toxic friendships, about insisting on mutuality in friendship, about drawing important boundaries in healthy friendships? But how often are we advised, “Become the kind of person you’d like to have as a friend”?

When I thought of the qualities I look for in a friend, it would mean I myself would need to commit to grow in these same qualities: faithfulness to Jesus; wisdom; a willingness to listen; patience and mercy in failure; passion for the kingdom of God.

Sure, it’s wonderful to have a friend to laugh with, to have fun with, to enjoy spending time with. But the friendships I’m most interested in cultivating are the transformative kind, the friendships that motivate and challenge me to love God more deeply and love my neighbor more faithfully.

“Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm,” (Prov. 13:20). Our friendships will shape us more than we know. They will teach us to praise—or complain; to forgive—or be unforgiving; to share—or selfishly demand. Choose wisely, then, as you’re deciding for friendship.

In short summary of this month’s posts, we’re in a crisis of friendship. Clarity, in our friendships, is a pretty rusty skill, though it’s an essential habit to practice.

Let’s keep becoming the kind of person we’d want to have as a friend. And let’s ask God for the gift of a friend, staying open and available to the possibility of friendship when it comes along.