Hunter Made for Friendship

The Relationship That Halves Our Sorrows and Doubles Our Joys
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4335-5822-1
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

God made you for friendship. Friendship is one of the deepest pleasures of life. But in our busy, fast-paced, mobile world, we've lost this rich view of friendship and instead settled for shallow acquaintances based on little more than similar tastes or shared interests. Helping us recapture a vision of true friendship, pastor Drew Hunter explores God's design for friendship and what it really looks like in practice-giving us practical advice to cultivate the kinds of true friendships that lead to true and life-giving joy.

Drew Hunter (MA, Wheaton College) is the teaching pastor at Zionsville Fellowship in Zionsville, Indiana. He is the author of Made for Friendship and the Isaiah and Matthew volumes in the Knowing the Bible series. Drew and his wife, Christina, live in Zionsville, Indiana, and have four children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hunter, Drew

Leseproben

2

The Edenic Ache

Two things are essential in this world—life, and friendship. Both must be prized highly, and not undervalued. They are nature’s gifts. We were created by God that we might live; but if we are not to live solitarily, we must have friendship.

Augustine

Human life requires few necessities: water, food, and oxygen. Other things like coffee, furniture, and even the Internet are nice, but ultimately optional. But what about friendship? We often think of it as a social luxury—important, surely—but necessary? But what if friendship is more like oil to a car’s engine than leather on its seats? What if life without friendship only takes us so far down the road until we start breaking down? What if it’s not just an optional theme in life but part of what it means to be human? Charles Spurgeon preached,

Friendship seems as necessary an element of a comfortable existence in this world as fire or water, or even air itself. A man may drag along a miserable existence in proud solitary dignity, but his life is scarce life, it is nothing but an existence.1

If you want to call friendship a luxury, that’s fine. But then make sure you also call air a luxury. There are few true necessities in life. Friendship is one of them.

Prescription: Friendship

How do we test this claim? If friendship were necessary, how would we know? For starters, we could consider what happens when we don’t have it. When we imagine such a scenario, we find that friendlessness isn’t just depressing; it’s actually quite dangerous. When we come unglued from others socially, we come unraveled emotionally, psychologically, and even physically. This is because we’re embodied beings. Our mind and emotions are mysteriously interconnected with our bodies. So when we experience loneliness, it affects every part of us.

This is true for everyone—men and women, extroverts and introverts. The former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said that when he saw patients, the most common illness was not cancer or heart disease but loneliness.2 Loneliness is a hazard to our health, and increasingly so with age. Loneliness “poses a particular threat to the very old, quickening the rate at which their faculties decline and cutting their lives shorter.”3

Thankfully, what loneliness removes, friendship restores. My wife’s grandmother went through a several-month stretch of loneliness. As she stayed home every day, her health and happiness slowly declined. Then she moved into an assisted-living home. She made fast friends with her neighbors, quickly regained her appetite, and started feeling well again. Here’s what this shows us: when loneliness unravels us, relationships put us back together.

Friendship is the missing medicine for many of our afflictions.

The ancient wisdom of Proverbs cautioned against isolation long ago: “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment” (Prov. 18:1). People may have their reasons for seclusion, but they have not followed the path of wisdom. I used to imagine a sage as a lonely graybeard who lived somewhere up on a great mountain. I clearly didn’t get that image from the Bible. The wise life looks like a journey with and for others, not by and for oneself.

On the other hand, we may fill our lives with people and yet never experience true friendship. According to Proverbs 18:24, “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” Proverbs tells us not to measure relational health by how many people we know but by how deeply we go with them.

The wise person journeys through life neither alone nor in an impersonal crowd, but side by side with friends.

The great assumption behind Proverbs’ vision of the good life is this: God made the world, and he made it to work a certain way. Therefore, the wise embrace his design. They know how to live well in God’s world. They see reality clearly, and they adjust to it. And if Proverbs emphasizes friendship to the point that it “might almost be called a treatise on friendship,”4 then this topic deserves our closest attention. Friendship is essential for the good life because God wove it into the fabric of the world.

The Ache for Friendship

The Bible’s first pages show our inescapable need for relationships. Several times the creation story in Genesis 1 repeats the phrase “and God saw that it was good” (1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). It climaxes with the seventh occurrence: “It was very good” (v. 31). Then in chapter 2, we read of one thing that is not good: “It is not good that the man should be alone” (2:18). Adam, the first human, lives, but he lives in isolation. And that’s a problem. As Martin Luther put it, “God created man for society and not for solitude.”5 Thus we can each make this statement our own: it is not good that [your name] should be alone.

God announces Adam’s problem and then parades the animals before him. Why this, and why now? So that Adam might feel his need for community. The animal parade made a point: apparently pets alone won’t do. Even “man’s best friend” passed by without special notice. This was because Adam didn’t need a pet; he needed another person. Animals are special, but human friendship is of a higher order.

This takes place before sin enters the world. That’s significant. Satan has not yet slithered in, the forbidden fruit has no fingerprints, and Adam’s conscience remains clear. The first problem in human history, the first problem on the pages of Scripture, the first problem in any human life, was not sin—it was solitude.

This means that the not-goodness of Adam’s aloneness was not a result of his fallenness. Adam stood there in Eden without fault, yet he also stood alone and therefore incomplete. He was missing something essential enough to warrant the divine declaration of “not good.” Adam, untouched by sin, needed a friend. Tim Keller notes,

Adam was not lonely because he was imperfect, but because he was perfect. The ache for friends is the one ache that is not the result of sin. . . . This is one ache that is part of his perfection. . . . God made us in such a way that we cannot enjoy paradise without friends. God made us in such a way that we cannot enjoy our joy without human friends. Adam had a perfect quiet time every day, 24 hours. He never had a dry one, and yet he needed [friends].6

Every soul reverberates with the echoes of this Edenic ache for friendship. It’s an ancient and primal longing. We are inescapably communal.

The opening chapters of Genesis cast a vision of the good life, full of shalom—a Hebrew concept referring in its fullest sense to flourishing, joy, and harmony. And this shalom exists between God, humanity, and creation. Each sphere of the physical world—land, sea, and sky—teems with life. Yet Adam stands in the middle of this exuberant wonder world—alone. Adam has life, and that’s a start. But he also needs community.

Since Adam doesn’t linger in isolation for long, we can’t be sure how this “not good” state would play out over time. But we do know what happens when this trajectory is followed, when we force someone away from human contact for months. It’s not good. Prison officials call solitary confinement, “the prison within the prison.”7 A central feature of solitary confinement is social isolation. It results in increased anxiety, depression, and mental illness. Isolation isn’t negative attention; it’s no attention, which is often worse. Solitary confinement unravels our humanity.

These dynamics compelled the main character in the movie Castaway to forge a friendship with Wilson—a volleyball. True, befriending a ball already betrays a bit of insanity, but this little companion brought some normalcy to Chuck Noland’s increasingly crazy mind. How do you answer the “what five things would you take to a desert island” question? If we want to keep our minds, at least one answer must be someone’s name. God made us in such a way that solitude and sanity cannot coexist for long. We will eventually only keep one or the other.

Of course complete isolation, whether in a prison or on an island, is not likely your future or mine. But our experiences of loneliness lean in that direction. Its trajectory is misery. Its end is dehumanization.

The Divine Affirmation of Friendship

So, on the sixth day God made Adam and he made Eve—the first friendship—and behold, it was very good.

It was Eve’s presence that finally made the creation “very good.” Consider when she arrives in the story. The creation account has two parts:...