True Male Friendship: Part II

[This post is the second in a series from Dustin Benge encouraging men to pursue true biblical friendship. — David Kotter]

I look back on my life, and think of the numerous friendships that I have had the privilege to participate. Some friendships were only for a season, but were enriching to my life. Then others that remain to this day that have blossomed from friendship into a brotherhood with a bond that cannot be broken. To be honest, I have never been the best at making friends. I have always been backward, awkward and shy around people I don't know. Never being the person that begins the conversation with a stranger. Always being the person in the back of the room timid and a bit scared at how others look at me. However, those enduring friendships that God has brought into my life have been a bottomless fountain upon which I draw for daily strength. In other words, I had rather have one really good friend than many acquaintances.

"Friendship," John Adams has written to his classmate and cousin, Nathan Webb, "Is one of the distinguishing glory's of man... From this I expect to receive the chief happiness of my future life." I have to agree with my favorite person in American History. True friendship between two people should bring happiness and joy. Friends are concerned about the well-being of one another. Friends are intimately involved in the good and bad times of one another's lives. Friends are always a rock upon which each can lean in times of storm. Friends enjoy a relationship that is deep, wide, high, and long reaching back into history reflecting all those friends who came before us.

According to Augustine, "In this world two things are essential: a healthy life and friendship. God created humans so that they might exist and live: this is life. But if they are not to remain solitary, there must be friendship." By all accounts, he was intent on living by the ideology he preached: it was a simple fact that Augustine hardly ever spent a moment of his life without some friend close by. While he was a middle-aged man (in letter 130, written in his mid-fifties) he could write that there is nothing enjoyable without good friends, and right near the end of his life, toward the end of the City of God, he could still ask rhetorically, "What gives us consolation in this human society filled as it is with errors and troubles, if not the sincere loyalty and mutual love of true and good friends?"

Augustine, perhaps better than anyone in Church history, understood human relationships. He valued the relationships he had while on the earth but was never satisfied. His supreme hope was to fully enjoy a friendship and intimacy with his Creator.

Friendship is a gift from God given to man to reflect the relationship that the Trinity shares within Themselves. Reflecting the relationship that God and Adam shared before the fall. A relationship we will share with Christ in the New Heaven and the New Earth.