What Makes A Good Friend?

This is something I have been thinking about lately as I realize one of the most important callings in my life is to be a friend. I have been in the habit of befriending those whom I am naturally attracted to and letting relationships ebb and flow as life takes me to different places and circumstances and changes swirl around me – never too sentimental about people as they come and go in my life. But in the past year or two I have been challenged to be more intentional about things that are important to me, and I realize that good friendships are made, not the result of a series of fortunate events. Growing and maintaining a friendship requires time, effort, generosity, vulnerability…but wait, I am getting ahead of myself. At a recent home group meeting, we put together a short list of what makes a good friend and I thought I would share the results with you. Here they are:

- Depth of honesty
- Unconditional love
- Faithfulness
- Good counsel
- Fun
- Enjoyable company
- Generous and sharing
- Believes in you
- Would lend you their jeans
- Present in your life on a consistent basis
- Shares your joy
- Has a similar outlook
- Respects your values, and you theirs
- Is real
- Listens
- You can be yourself around them
- Unguarded
- Friend of God
- Friend to the needy
- Dependable
- Someone who protects
- Someone who knows you
- Welcoming, open, accepting
- Sticks with you
- Always on your side
- Gives things up for you
- Defends you

We all love having good friends, but how good of a friend are we? True, selfless, friendship, like the kind David and Jonathan exemplified in the Bible, is very inconvenient (you can read about it in 1 Samuel beginning with chapter 18). Jonathan gave up his right to become king for the sake of his friend. Jonathan risked his life for the safety of his friend. Jonathan put the relationship with his family at risk for the sake of his friend. The words used to describe the bond between them sound strangely like marriage vows and have made more than a few people uncomfortable with their intimate nature. I believe that discomfort reveals a lot about how little we know about this quality of friendship.

I have often expressed a desire to be a friend of God but will readily admit that most of the time I am dumbfounded as to how to get there. Something I heard our friend Mike say when we were in New York really struck me. “If you know how to be a friend, you know how to stay connected to God, because that’s what it looks like: friendship.”

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go...

Esther's protest

I have been hesitant to write anything here pertaining to the student protests in Montreal, partly because I didn't believe I had any solutions to offer and partly because I just wanted to stay out of the controversial mess it has become. Besides, I have studying to do. But this weekend, something changed. I read the book of Esther. First, some background: the unrest started early in the year when a group of students decided to protest the tuition hikes proposed by the Quebec government ($325 a year for the next 5 years). Seeing that tuition rates have been frozen for almost ten years, it seemed reasonable to the government to increase them to reflect rising costs. This did not sit well with some students, and they organised an ongoing protest in which students were encouraged to boycott classes and refuse to hand in assignments. It has now grown into a movement which has staged several organise...

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ C...

outWORD by Matte Downey

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