Wednesday, July 8, 2009

The High Cost of Friendship

I was reading in a recent issue of Relevant Magazine an article of the same title to this blog. In a nut shell the article was about the death of the authors college friend at the tender age of 26. He was lamenting about how, as he looked around the room he realized that this "scene" would eventually repeat itself over and over again until each one of his friends was gone.

I have blogged about some of this before so it wasn't so much that stuff that struck me about this article. It was the high cost of friendship that struck me. I really have never put it into those terms. If you begin to think about it though there is a cost.

Everything we do in life costs us something, whether it's time, energy, money, emotions, whatever, there is a cost associated with it. And friendships come at a really high cost. Especially the deep friendships, the ones that really mean something to us. The author says this, "Friends. real know-you-down-to-your-soul friends, come at a high cost. they guarantee a lifetime of broken hearts as we say goodbye, farewell and amen, again and again, over the course of our lives."

He goes on, "True friendship demands vulnerability. It requires that you rearrange your schedule, and intentionally plan time to spend with other people with no agenda. It demands choice, as sociologists agree that it's only possible to have 8 to 12 'real' friends...".

Wow, how true is that. I believe that God created us for relationships with others. I do, He says that in the book of Genesis, "it's not good for man to be alone", and I believe that to be true. I know in my life, if I didn't have my wife and kids, if I didn't have my close friends, life would be missing something.

Social networking is all the rage, facebook, twitter, linkedn. I love each of them for what they were intended to do, draw people closer. The problem is they have the ability to separate us if we let it happen. For me, I love to see what others are doing because it does make me feel closer, but it is not a substitute for hanging out and having true conversation. THAT is real!

Is friendship worth such a high cost? For me, yes. As a human being I am truly a selfish individual and so are you, but we must fight against that flesh. We must follow our heart, because when you follow your heart, you don't care if your cell phone rings at 3am and one of your friends needs you, you spring into action, that's is how we were originally made, to care and to love people without strings, without judgement!

Now I am just rambling, but since it's my blog I guess I can do that. I will end with this, and I will quote the author of the article again because I couldn't say it better.

"It's very human to try to avoid all pain, but the real question is what kind of pain will we face. We either suffer alone for a lifetime, or choose daily to pay the high cost of friendship."

I choose the high cost. How about you?