#friendship

Memorable Loss

Is it possible for beauty to exist alongside realities as distressing as dementia and as dreadful as death? Is it possible to write about such realities in a way that is both devastating and encouraging, that is both shatteringly sorrowful and heartbreakingly beautiful? Karen Martin’s Memorable Loss: A Story of Friendship in the Face of Dementia answers with a resounding yes. Karen Martin’s friendship with Kathleen was perhaps a bit unconventional, not least because they were separated in age by …

How To Ruin a Perfectly Good Friendship

A friend and I recently realized that we have not been spending as much time together as we would like. We agreed it is high time to do something about it. But what to do? We put our heads together and determined that we will deliberately build time for one another into our schedules. But we also determined that we need to maximize those times together. To ensure this we will go through an evaluation process to consider whether they …

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The Best Friendship in the World

This week I read Michael Haykin’s Iron Sharpens Iron, a short book about great friendships. I found a couple of quotes in the book that I thought would be worth sharing so you can reflect on them as I have. The first is an excerpt from John Ryland’s sermon at the funeral of his friend Andrew Fuller. Their friendship, he said, had never met with one minute’s interruption by any one unkind word or thought, of which I have any knowledge. …

Friendship and the Grace of God

Most of us are familiar with the term “means of grace.” Means of grace are the ways in which the Holy Spirit works in our lives to lead us into holiness. You might think of them as the “channels” through which sanctifying grace flows from God to his people. Most prominently he does this through Scripture, prayer, and the ordinances of baptism and Lord’s Supper (or, more broadly, through the unique ministry of the local church). But did you know …

An Unexpected, Overlooked Benefit of Friendships

You may have noticed that books tend to arrive in bunches. Once publishers identify that readers are interested in a particular theme, several will often commission authors to write on the subject. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen quite a number of books on friendship. Most of them address friendship in a digital world and say, rightly, that it has fallen on hard times as so many people focus less on real-world relationships and more on online relationships. …

The Joys (and the Limitations) of Male-Female Friendships

Newton’s third law tells us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Though this law pertains to physics, it seems equally true in the realm of ideas. Recently, a renewed emphasis on the value of the Billy Graham/Mike Pence Rule as a means of protecting sexual fidelity has provoked an equal and opposite emphasis on the value of male-female friendships. To be clear, what’s under discussion here is not whether it’s okay for couples to be …

Why Are You Friends with Your Friends?

Are you friends with your friends for the sake of your friends? Or are you friends with your friends for the sake of yourself? I suspect you don’t really know while you derive some clear benefit from the relationship. As long as the relationship is gain, not loss, as long as it enhances your reputation instead of diminishes it, you probably don’t really know. A friend and I were recently considering some mutual acquaintances who had fallen on hard times. …

Foster Your Friendships

Charles Spurgeon said that the voices of childhood echo through life in such a way that the “first learned is generally the last forgotten.” The lessons we learn in our earliest years tend to remain fixed to the end. This is tremendously beneficial when the lessons have been sound, but terribly detrimental when they have not. One harmful lesson men often learn early in life is that they should be suspicious of relationships with other men. From our youngest days we …

Kindness that Comes Too Late

I have always been glad that there was one person who brought out her alabaster jar and anointed the Lord before his burial. Most people would have waited. They would have kept the jar sealed until after his death. Only then, when his body was torn and cold, would they have broken it open to anoint him. But this one woman did not wait. She opened the jar while he could still enjoy its scent, and while his worn and …

Love Is a Risky Business

Love is a risky business. In one way or another, at one time or another, we have all suffered because we have loved. We have all been shocked to learn something we didn’t know before, we have all been grieved as we have discovered another person’s hidden actions or behavior. Some of us have even asked: If I had known that before, would I have still loved her? Now that I know that, can I still love him? We love …