There are few blessings in life better than a good friendship. Though most of us count a wide range of people as our friends, most of us have two or three we count especially close and especially trusted. While I was sitting at John MacArthur’s memorial service and hearing his friends tell of their love for him (and his for them), I began to ponder some of the unexpected blessings that have come with both having friends and being a friend. Here are just three that came to mind.
A friend’s spouse. It is unusual for a couple to click perfectly with another couple, though certainly it’s possible. In my experience, it is typical for either the husbands to click and then draw their wives into the friendship or the wives to click and then draw in their husbands. But either way, one unexpected blessing of having friends is developing a friendship with my friends’ wives. These are women I relate to in a way that feels almost brotherly-to-sisterly, a friendship that has Christ in common but also a shared love for another person. A wife will often have a special love and appreciation for her husband’s friends because she sees how they make him a better man. And that friend will often have a special love and appreciation for her because he hears so often of her husband’s love and affection for her. While Christians rightly guard their relationships with members of the opposite sex, the relationship fostered with a friend’s spouse can be especially close and delightful, mediated as it is through a person who is especially loved by both.
A friend’s children. One of the best and most unexpected blessings of being friends is enjoying a relationship with my friends’ children. I have a few friends whose children I relate to much as if they are nieces or nephews—the kind I will go out of my way to spend time with, the kind who have a standing invitation to visit my home, the kind I will make myself available to should they need a listening ear. Meanwhile, my children have a handful of trusted men and women—my friends and Aileen’s—that they relate to in just this way. These are people who put extra effort into loving them, looking out for them, and offering them an extra source of mature counsel. It is a pleasure to love my friends’ children and a tremendous blessing to know my friends love my children.
A friend’s friends. And then there is this: To have a friend is to become friends with his other friends, to have the circle of friendship widened by a degree or two. Several times, I have been almost surprised to become friends with the friends of my friends—rather a clunky sentence, I know, but I think you understand what I’m getting at. I suppose it makes sense that if we click with a certain person, we are also likely to click with the people he especially enjoys. And what a pleasure it has been to form friendships with people I met through a shared relationship with someone we both love and enjoy.
God is good to give us friends, and he is good all the more to extend the blessings and benefits of friendship so it is not just a one-to-one relationship but one that broadens until two families and two circles of relationship have been joined together and fused by a shared love.
