A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.
In a world so rough and fractured as this we poor sons of Adam create, it is easy to despair of finding true relationship, to despise all search for it, to expect treachery and therefore eschew covenant. I cannot be betrayed when I require no loyalty, and he who makes no relationship need never worry about false friends. ‘Me and my God,’ I might say, content with the one relationship in which I am the only traitor. Long cavalcades of abuse, a culture inimical to Biblical love, and the resulting despondency, these seem strong reasons to cease seeking any relationship deeper than acquaintance, whether friendship or kinship or marriage.
Against this understandable impulse, God sends a message of hope and of duty. Relationship may be hard, and it may be dangerous, but it can be true. When we read of David and Jonathan, when we read of Sam and Frodo, we need not relegate the possibility, in a form particular to us, into history (for the first) and fiction (for the second). Our relationships will certainly hurt, but they can be the solid, unyielding oak which makes all that pain entirely worth it.
Now, if anyone here denies that our culture has messed up relationships is advised to take a second look. The fracturing of our social fabric on a grand scale is fundamentally a shattering of our skill in the foundational social relationships: marriage, parenthood, friendship, partnership, and acquaintanceship, not to mention participation in the church body and the civil government. As a rule, being men taught wrongly by our world, our culture doesn’t know how to establish lasting bonds which survive mutual wrongs and differences of opinion. We swing wildly towards atomization and then back to making the relationship an idol, as if there are no limits.
Thus, many despair of true friendship. Friendliness, of course, is quite plausible. We can shake hands with some people, talk piffle and politics, share a meal on occasion. These little indicators of relationship, however, seem to sit by themselves, the surface ripples of a puddle, not a pond or an ocean. These things are good, but they are not enough. We have in them only the aesthetics of the reality they should signify.
Stories open to us vision of this deeper reality. Some of those stories are from people around us, their experience recapitulated in our ears, whether ongoing friendships or the legacy of their age. Our parents and grandparents have their own relationships (or had them, when they lived), and imperfect as they were, often they had something desirable in them, parts at least which were substantial as modernity’s superficial friendliness is not and only apes. We see, too, those around us who have marriages not perfect but real, an idea which seems too often absurd.
Some of those stories are from fiction and from history. We read of Sam and Frodo, and we recognize a bedrock loyalty and groundedness. We discover the relationships, substantial even if not so deep, which characterize the social fabric of our forefathers, their mutual trust of their neighbors which went farther than merely lacking apprehension of malice. Each of these has different parts, and each of us knows some part of relationship which he has longed for, seeing it somewhere else.
The temptation, again, is to despair. Perhaps most stridently is this expressed in the field of marriage. Young Christian men aver that they’ve no women to speak to and trust till death; young Christian women say the same, in different places. Too many have seen Christian marriages crash and judder on the rocks, either to apostasy or to mere sordid sin, and too often they’ve seen the church body jam its toes resolutely in its own mouth before addressing the problem substantially. The temptation is powerful to say: ‘I cannot have; it is not available to me.’ At the base, very often, the true statement is this: ‘The possibility is too small to be worth the risk.’
God does not think so. He calls for wisdom, certainly, in seeking relationship. We shouldn’t simply throw ourselves against the first human-shaped object and lavish it with loyalty and affection. No. The steps of relationship are giving and taking in escalation, each learning the other’s measure, pressing against his fiber to see if it will hold. The first part of relationship, therefore, is establishing a pattern of strong moral fiber (of wisdom) which will grow stronger in response to the strain of loving another flawed human and of learning to love, to be loved, rather than fraying and weakening.
Prudence moderates entrance into relationship, but wisdom and duty and their master, God, demand that we seek relationship. “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother,” today’s verse assures us, and if we refuse the call, we’ll never find him. And of course, at the end, we have that one friend assured to us, by His grace, that friend of Whom it is said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:31). “What a friend we have in Jesus,” we may sing truly, “all our sins and griefs to bear!” (J.M. Scriven, What A Friend We Have In Jesus).
God bless.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Colson Potter writes copious fiction and nonfiction, including a weekly Proverbs post and his blog at Creational Story.
