A man who has friends must himself be friendly - Proverbs 18:24
“Best friends” is something teenagers do, and “teenagers” is something Boomers made up — so critics like to remind us. As true as this may be, it’s now so ingrained into our culture and way of thinking we aren’t sure of how to do without it — that is without a good friend.
There are plenty of blogs that will tell you how to find or make friends, and plenty more that will tell you how to look out for yourself by knowing your needs and making your boundaries plainly spoken. However it is not enough to know where to go to find friends if you can’t see to make a friendship last longer than a few months, or year or two, and making your boundaries known only gets you as far as the other person is willing to receive — you want to be approachable, and not affront strangers with your basket-case needs.
Loyalty goes a long way in maintaining friendships, but it’s a word overwrought with use that it takes many forms and shapes. Many people say, “I want a loyal friend” but know little of what it means or how to be one. It’s become almost too grand for definition, or whitewashed by other ideas. And yet it is a pillar of a friendship.
It is almost enough on it’s own — if you can define it. And because we can’t, here are five things you can do that will improve your friendships:
Trust Everyone
If you are someone who doesn’t trust easily, you are also probably without many (or any) friends. A lot of girls boast of not having many friends, as if it speaks to a tenderness in their soul. And yet, a tender soul does not disparage friendship. To be truly sensitive is to love more wholly, completely — more like Jesus might.
While the idea of having a best friend is modern, friendships are ancient, and all religions are full of proverbs of how to be a good friend. They made no distinction from the acquaintance, neighbor, foreigner, or blood relative — anyone they met was to be treated as a friend. It did not matter who they were, if they showed up to their tent or home they were given something to eat and to drink, and they spoke as good friends speak, amiably and freely. Or so the Proverbs exhorted. There have always been bad, friends, too, from the beginning of time.
Friendships a single soul in two bodies - Aristotle
The good man is the friend to all living things - Gandhi
Few men have the strength the natural strength to honor a friend’s success without envy - Aeschylus
When you trust all men equally, you do not discriminate based on intimacy. Your duty to your spouse and your child and your church and your strangers and your neighbors are all each duties, each most sacred in its own form, each set apart by roles and stipulations, but equal none the same. This equality might be informed — you know that your good friend Nancy never repays loans, or that Jim shows up to the party three hours late, or that Lee has a way of stretching the truth, or that Sue cuts to the front of the line and takes too many dinner rolls.
You know these things, and yet you trust each one in their own right, making allowances for their faults as Jesus does for each of us. For we have all sinned and fallen short of His Glory, however we are called to be gracious on all occasions, even to the ones who we do not like very much.
Friends will misuse you — the lesson learned is not to trust less. Friends must guard carefully against the jaded-colored demon of bitterness. You will be offended, mistreated, robbed. And yet, it is your soul that loses its childlike faith when you stop trusting all men equally, and God will show you how to love them.
Never Verbalize Your Boundaries
Pop culture loves to assign methods for shaping the Soul in Search of Self-healing. In other words, we are bombarded with encouragement to “know our boundaries” and to make them known. Enlightened friends will get all excited when they come across these new “tips for bettering your relationships” and talk of “Well, now I have boundaries, so things are going well.”
(Except they aren’t, not usually).
The problem isn’t with actually having boundaries, but in thinking your boundaries are unique or special. However, it’s quite dangerous when you start believing your needs and boundaries are superior. You will start losing friends, and not for any noble reasons.
The only boundaries worth having are universal and unspoken. You won’t need to set them, because God did that for all of us when He gave us a moral compass. Occasionally a friend will forget to use their moral compass and might offend you. You’ve two options: forgive them immediately and hope it doesn’t happen again, or gently let them know that whatever they did wasn’t quite in keeping with being a Decent Person (don’t be a jerk when you say this, though). If you do it correctly it won’t be a matter of “my” vs “your” boundaries, but of being a good friend, willing to reproach and encourage when it is proper to do so.
Ironically, those with few friends who claim to have trust issues also like to talk a lot about their boundaries. Just don’t. We all know what sort of things just shouldn’t be done to each other — address any wrong doing if it happens, but don’t start out on the defense.
Grow Your Friend Group And Participate At All Times
The older you get the more your friendships should expand. Track records always matter, so be aware of how the majority of your friends feel about you—it helps of course, if you have many friend circles with some overlap, because some communities are infiltrated by evil spirits and will give you a poor representation of yourself to you.
If your friend group isn't growing, it isn't authentic.
Try to keep the company of people who like you, who don’t talk about boundaries and distrust too much, and who are open to going with the flow, and try to be that friendly person. Whenever there is an opportunity to participate, do it. Never sit out unless for random exceptions, or if the game or conversation is sincerely sinister. Swallow phobias and fears and preferences whenever possible and try new things, and if there’s a new person in the vicinity make sure to include them — never allow your friend group to become a clique. Not only is it uncharitable to exclude new members to your group, cliques always crumble because they are built upon false pretenses that usually care more about status than true friendship.
It's not a compliment if you've made it into the inner circle of someone who doesn't trust easily, unless you're doing the righteous work of enlarging their circle. More likely than not the constraints of their circle will entrap you and you'll be at risk of losing other friends, so take care to trust easily. This might lead others to heal so they, too, will trust and invite new friends.
Your friend group will grow mostly by trusting and allowing differences to exist, and even flourish. This means there won’t be any cutting of ties or shunning over any trivial matters. You can’t control what the other believes, how they dress, how they speak. You do you, and if that’s a worthy example, so be it. However, there’s no need to put each others’ values or personalities on trial.
Overlook Faults and Don’t Be Petty
If you feel a friend has betrayed you, take some time to weigh your feelings, and consider their perspective as best as you can. When it comes time to have a conversation with them about it, prepare yourself to confront them in a non-aggressive manner. If you feel past memories bubbling to the surface ask yourself if it’s really about what you think it is. More than likely this is the case and there’s a lot more to sort through than this one scenario. You need to pray and seek wisdom, if so. More than likely there are insecurities and misunderstandings so intertwined now that talking about it may now be impossible.
If you come to this conclusion, talking about it is probably not actually a good idea. To be a good friend might mean taking some time to deal with your own internal drama. When you’ve done that, you very well may return and find you’re no longer offended — that God has healed whatever thing was irking you, and that it had little to do with your friend’s fallen nature.
The culture of boundaries has also lead us to expect too much from our friends emotionally. While we should always expect to be treated courteously, and offered a glass of water, and fed, and a place to stay if in need, we are not entitled to the secrets and personal details of our friends, especially as we mature and leave childhood behind us.
On the other hand, a conversation may still be due. Never accuse. Never say, “You’ve betrayed me”. It’s a petty thing to say in almost any scenario, and rarely true, even if it feels so. When you have these conversations be careful to talk about what it is that’s causing you suffering. Likely they are ignorant — so you are enlightening them, but you are not demanding an apology, or accusing them of responsibility for your insecurities.
There are a lot of silly things that ruin friendships. None of these are valid reasons for terminating a friendship, and are usually based on envy, nihilism, bitterness, or a misunderstanding:
attention seeking
comparison traps
mean girl syndrome
always talking about oneself
too prudish
autistic
insecure/ annoying/ clingy
etc
Never throw these out at anyone. If they are true (and they are true for each of us in some measure) it is YOUR job as a friend to love those insecurities out of your friend, not tell them they are worthless because of them. Instead of acting in a vindictive, unfriendly manner, acknowledge that all humans even your friends are broken. Look past their flaws with love. Even if they don’t repay debts or show up late or forget to return your favorite book — they are a child of God and it is not up to you who He determines will cross your path for you to love.
God will show me if I am to edify their behavior. Meanwhile I must remember humility, and more than likely they will be the ones to exhort me to better living.
Letting a Friend Go Knowing All Shall Be Reconciled
I will never say that a friendship shouldn’t work out, mostly because I don’t think Jesus would say that. Unfortunately the devil is bent on destroying goodwill among men. Sometimes friendships will fail to no fault of your own, and often it is as devastating as a divorce.
When a friend doesn't want to be kept, they will set up unique and special boundaries that look no different from someone guarding their personal property with “no trespassing” signs. You can't stop them once they've decided they have rights to not trust you.
All you can do is respond calmly and with charity. "I will give you space. No, this is not right, but I respect what you want, and if ever in the future you need a friend, all is forgotten and I am still your friend."
I have not lost many friends in my life — of the ones I have lost, most of those I have regained because years down the road they did still want my friendship once our conflict had faded so it seemed almost contrived.
If you allow a friend to go in such a manner they might remember how you were actually loyal in the ways that mattered, even when they wanted “boundaries” you’d been willing to be there.
Some friendships — and acquaintances — get stuck in a reactive devaluation loop. They’ve established that you judge them or deem them inferior in some way — they managed to project some fanciful delusion that you hate them. If you bluntly address it they will take your words as an admittance. These situations are different for different people — I can usually intuit it in a first glance when a middle-aged woman has eyed me up and down, assessed my old-fashioned manner, heard the charismatic lilt in my tone, and determined that I will condemn her as ugly, worthless, and stupid. She will have justified reasons for thinking this way. If I try to be nice, she will interpret my words as inauthentic — dripping with put-on niceties. If I am quiet she decides I am evaluating her. If I am simply speaking my mind on any matter I am thinking of her, she imagines. And so there is no true solution to making amends. I have done nothing wrong except be myself. Even my charity and graciousness is mistaken to be an affront. Perhaps in years these women might come to see I am not all that bad, except any mistake I do commit (and I will make mistakes) will be remembered and held against me, so that such a reckoning is nearly impossible without an intention to want to understand one another.
Usually I meet these sort of women in passing and hardly need have long interactions with them, and yet it is a conundrum that plagues me, and on the rare occasion it has infiltrated some of my long-lasting friendships. Where I thought we had a friendship based on mutual interest and curiosity on one another’s differences, there were private misgivings encouraged unwittingly by things I said that proved my supposed disdain for them.
These are the sorts of friends who don’t want to be kept. You simply can’t even try. You must remain gracious, trusting, and charitable for the sake of your own soul, and even open to the potential rebirth of the friendship in later years. When friendships end unfairly and you are misjudged in any capacity you must have a sort of delusional hope that everything will be reconciled — for is it not written so in scripture?
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace Colossians 1:20
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My takeaway from this is our ultimate responsibility to grow trust and tenderness with those we cross paths with on this earth. And that the special sacredness we feel with our specific friends is not so much due to our interacting with them well, but rather, to the fact these are the very ones we happened to meet on our journey at all. Thanks, Keturah!
Thx for writing this. It has reinforced some ideas I’ve been thinking about lately.