When Did Friendship Get So Expensive?

There’s a Yoruba proverb, Ogún ọmọ kì í ṣeré ogún ọdún, twenty children cannot play together for twenty years. And it’s true. Very rarely do we keep the friends we had years ago, the ones who knew us before we became whoever we are now.

I count myself blessed, though. I have friends, close ones, spanning twenty years and more, and the oldest friendship I have is thirty-four years old. I am thirty-five. (He was born eleven days after me. We grew up in the same church.) We aren’t as close as we would like to be these days. He lives on another continent now, and life has a way of stretching the distance between people. Even so, every time we manage to catch up with him or the others, it is as though no time has passed at all. We are brothers.

Perhaps that is why this present moment grieves me so deeply.

Almost every three days, when I sit with someone from church, I hear about a friendship that is fracturing, or one that is already gone. People who once loved each other deeply have become enemies, and sometimes something worse, strangers. They have gone from sharing a life to being unable to bear the thought of each other, let alone being in the same room. I keep asking why.

When I asked our small group if I should teach a series on friendship, almost everyone said yes straight away. Before I take it to the whiteboard, I wanted to think aloud here first.

Our generation is caught somewhere between loneliness and counterfeit company. There are people with no friends at all, people surrounded by friends who would disappear the moment it cost them anything, people who have forgotten how to make new ones, and people who keep everyone they love at the safe distance of a screen. We are more connected and less befriended than any people who have ever lived.

The Theology of Friendship

So what do the Texts say? Scripture treats friendship as something close to sacred. “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity” (Proverbs 17:17). I think of my friend, born eleven days after me, and that verse stops being poetry. And at the centre of it all, Jesus turns to ordinary men and calls them friends (John 15:15), then tells us what the word costs: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

Then there is the story I cannot get out of my mind. A paralysed man has four friends and one hope, to get him in front of Jesus. The house is so crowded they cannot even reach the door, so they climb up onto the roof, tear it open, and lower their friend down on his mat into the room below (Mark 2:1–12). Think about what that took. They destroyed property that wasn’t theirs and made a spectacle of themselves, all on the gamble that the man inside could actually help. And the line that gets me every time is this: “When Jesus saw their faith,” he forgave and healed the man. The friends carried what their friend could not, and heaven took notice.

C.S. Lewis loved friendship enough to give it a whole book. In The Four Loves, he said something about friendship that I had felt for years without ever finding words for it. Friendship is the one love nobody is forced into. It arrives by accident, in some ordinary moment when you say a true thing about yourself and the other person’s face changes and they say, “What, you too? I thought I was the only one.” Two people who each believed they were walking alone realise they have been on the same road all along. Lovers spend their days gazing at each other; friends walk shoulder to shoulder, eyes set on the same thing further up the road. For those of us who follow Jesus, the thing up ahead, the one we keep squinting toward together, turns out to be him.

Lewis takes this further than I had ever followed it.

“In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”

―C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

The friends in my life were handed to me on purpose. God arranged the introductions, and he uses these friendships to show me a beauty in other people that I would have walked straight past on my own.

It is one of my favourite moments in the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. Near the end of the long climb to Mount Doom, Frodo collapses and cannot carry his burden a single step further. Sam cannot take it from him, so he does the only thing left. “I can’t carry it for you,” he says, “but I can carry you.” Then he lifts his friend onto his back. We were made to carry one another (Galatians 6:2), which is what I was reaching for in my piece on being your brother’s keeper.

Some friendships fail for the simple reason that nobody was willing to be Sam.

Who Are You Carrying?

Look around your life for a moment. Someone in it is going under, and they will not always say so. It might be the friend whose replies have gone short, or the brother who keeps insisting he is fine in a voice that plainly is not.

This is the part I have to preach to myself first. We are quick to ask who would carry us when we are down, and quicker still to keep a ledger of the times our friends failed to show up the way we wanted. The harder question is whether I would show up the way Sam showed up for Frodo, or the way four men once tore a roof apart to reach Jesus, even when it embarrasses me and costs me more than I had planned to give. An old line many of us grew up hearing says it plainly: to have friends you must show yourself friendly (Proverbs 18:24, KJV). Friendship is a thing we do before it is a thing we receive.

So When Did Friendship Get So Expensive?

The cost of friendship is inconvenience. Real friendship will interrupt your plans and your sleep, it will ask for your time and your money, and now and then it will cost you your pride. There is no cheap version of it. If you have love, though, the inconvenience stops feeling like a price and begins to feel like a privilege.

The honest answer to the question is that it never did. Friendship did not quietly become costly somewhere between our grandparents and our group chats. It was always this expensive, and the price has not moved an inch. We are simply the first generation to be promised the warmth of belonging at the discount of never being put out for anyone, and we keep being surprised when the bill comes back unpaid.

Underneath the inconvenience lies the real price, which is love, the kind that sacrifices. The clearest picture of that love is a hill outside Jerusalem. The truest friend any of us will ever have looked at people who had run from him and denied they ever knew him, and he climbed his own mountain carrying them anyway. He paid the whole price of friendship while we were still strangers to him, and Scripture says he did it for the joy set before him. That is the love being offered to you. Once it lays hold of you, you begin to find that you can spend yourself on others in something of the way he spent himself on you. The inconvenience never disappears. It simply stops being the thing you are counting.

I’ve been carried too..

I have been on the receiving end of this kind of love, and I cannot write about it lightly. When Eva and I lost our baby in the middle of the pandemic, our married friends Victor and Vanessa moved into our home and stayed. They cared for us and prayed over us in the days when we had no prayers of our own. When Paul and Percy could not fly into our city to be with me, they fasted for days so that I might be strengthened in spirit. There have been more of these kindnesses than I can name, debts of carrying I could not repay in several lifetimes. My one hope is that I will get to carry these friends too, on the day they cannot carry themselves.

I pray you find friends that will carry you, but even more, I pray that you have strength to carry your friends when they can’t carry themselves.

I will teach the full series soon. For now, ask yourself one honest question. Who has God given you to carry, and what would it cost you to climb the roof for them?

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In Him, for Him, by Him,

Jesse