We all want a FAITHFUL friends. That is, we want friends who are committed to us. We want the sort of fiends who stick with us even when being our friends cost them something.
What sort of commitment is right for friendship? What kind of commitment should we make to our friends?
Recall that we don't usually begin friendship with a commitment. The commitment comes to life gradually. We commit ourselves to each other in snippets, in all sorts of little ways, over a long haul.
We hardly notice when we have first made a commitment to be a friend to someone. But when our friends have special needs, or get into tough situations, we discover that we actually have made a commitment to them without thinking much about it. What sort of commitment is it? I think we make three sorts of commitments, and these are fundsmental for lasting friendships.
Commitment is About Loyalty.
We don't betray friends, never treat them the way people treat enemies: for instance, we don't tell their secrets to other people. And we don't desert them, we don't treat them like strangers even when they are in a lot of trouble.
Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state, went to visit his friend Alger Hiss in prison, convicted traitor though Hiss was, bad politics though it was to visit him. When more prudent politician condemned him publicly, Acheson simply said, "A friend does not forsake a friend just because he is in jail." That's LOYALTY.
When Richard Nixon was at the lowest ebb of his presidency, at the nadir of Watergate, he got a letter from Harold Macmillan, the former prime minister of England. The letter read, in part, "I feel impelled, in view of our long friendship, to send you a message of sympathy and good will. I trust that these clouds may soon roll away."
When Macmillan died a while later, Richard Nixon wrote a tribute to him in "The Times of London. Among the things he remembered about the prime minister was his letter of friendship. " What you learn when you fail," Nixon wrote, "is that you hear from your friends." Your Loyal Friends.
Loyalty is the heart and soul of any commitment friendship. This is probably why it seems so much more horrible that Jesus was betrayed by a friend than it would have seemed if a stranger had turned him in. So much more monstrous that Caesar was stabbed in the back by his friend Brutus than had he been stabbed by Cassius, whom Caesar did not trust anyway.
LOYALTY is the consistency that gives friendship a toughness to survive when it costs a person something to stick with a friend.
Commitment is About Caring.
Caring for a friend is the heart of commitment. To care is to invest one's self in a friend's fortune. If I care for you as my friend, whatever happens to you happens to me, when sadness hits you it hits me too, when tragedy wallops you it wallops me, when something terrific happens to you I celebrate no matter where I happens to be. What happens to you matters a lot to me, it concerns me, it makes a genuine difference to my own life. This is what care is about: investment in each other.
Caring is a concerto with infinite variations, but consider two of them.
To care is to make for friends, interrupt our work schedules, put aside Saturday chores, have breakfast with a friends instead of going to church. We don't have this kind if time to give many friends. And we don't have the energy. Some of us can manage time for only one or two really close friends. Not many of us can do justice to more than three.
To care is to be honest with friends. A friend is not idol. Nor is a friend an uncritical fan. Friendship cannot survived long on benevolent fakery, nor do friends stay friends for long when one of them uses flattery to win friendshio. For friendship to last we need to care enough to be honest. Of course, the caring has to be transparent in our honesty, honesty without caring can ruin friendship. But if we care, we will be honest.
Commitment is About Accepting a Friend's claim on us.
A friend has a right to expect us to do things for her that we would not do for just anyone: give her special consideration, do her special favors, show her special concern, go the extra mile to be with her. And if you ask her, "Why should I?" She has every right to reply, "Just because I'm your Friend."
Friends play favorites, the way parents favor their children above their neighbors children. That's what friendship is about. And they should expect it from each other. They have a claim on it.
A story of friendship with CAL and JOHN they were very closed friend until CAL died.
They both meet in the registration line at Calvin College, where CAL back from the war, was enrolling as a freshman born out of due time. They both had a hunch, then and there, that they might hit it off.
There friendship took time to take root, of course, and there were dry spells, but it grew, and they finally became committed friends. They stayed as best friends for twenty-five years, until cancer discover to CAL and killed him.
They never said much about there friendship until just before CAL died.
John lived in California the time CAL diagnose with cancer. He got cancer in his liver that the surgeons could not cut away. The doctor said over the phone to John, If you wanted to talk with CAL before he died get back to Michigan pretty quickly. So JOHN got on a flight to Grand Rapids the next day, and spent a week with him in his hospital room, talking about a lot of things they had never talked about before.
JOHN told CAL that he was grateful to God that he had been his friend for so long. CAL also told JOHN he was grateful too. And they cried together.
They never spoke a vow. Never use the word commitment. And yet there friendship lasted because they are committed to each other. A thousand commitments, little ones, again and again, as we had occasion to make them.
I think that to last for any time at all, any friendship needs commitment.
Still even committed friendship can die. And something in us wants a good friendship to last for life.
We want a lasting friendship as much as we want a lasting lover. Even more, sometimes.
But friendship does not seem to be meant to last forever, not when it is blended only of the three classic ingredients: AFFECTION, ADVANTAGE, and ADMIRATION. The more reason, then, to remember that commitment is the one thing we can add to ordinary friendship to make it last longer, sometimes for life.
Our hearts tell us that friendship ought to last forever. And the longings we have for lasting friendships may be a hint that we are meant for them after all, that the day will come when every good friendship lasts forever.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing