Friend - Will you intervene?

Friendship is crucial to emotional and personal development. We learn to become fully human persons in part through our relational history. Friendship is good not only for our personal development but also for our moral development. One reason is that friendship offers a second self with whom we share feelings, thoughts, moral judgments and criticism. Paul Wadell notes, “One reason we have friends is that there is a good we share with them, but the reason friendships grow and become such a delight is that we cannot be good without them, indeed, we cannot be good at all”

Our mordern society is organized in such a way that long and deep friendships are exceedingly difficult. In “God’s week has 7 days”, Wally Kroeker tells of how he was aghast to read in the paper that his friend Russell had been charged with embezzlement. Later that day they met over coffee. For five years, Russell rose rapidly in his profession and adjusted his life style to support his image. Then in a cash-flow pinch, he "borrowed" someone else's assets, dipped into another account to pay back the first, and so on.

As he described his plight it dawned on him that he hadn't been a good friend to Russell. He should have mentioned something when he noticed him becoming consumed by his work, when he stopped coming to some of the church events they used to attend together.He might have confronted him on his increasingly overheated lifestyle and upscale tastes.

Someone needs to tell us, as Jethro told his son-in-law Moses [in Exodus 18:17-18], "What you are doing is not good." That kind of intervention may be seen as a threat to privacy. But isn't that an essential part of Christian mutual support?

The active promotion of the concept of friendship might lead us to the conclusion that it is widely experienced. We have friendly churches, user-friendly machines and friendship evangelism. Yet behind the rhetoric is a deep craving for what is seldom experienced-intimate, lifelong relationships in which persons are enjoyed simply for who they are and not what they can do for us.

Ironically, people who boast of “my friends” may be among the most lonely as they are encircled by acquaintances, business colleagues or others linked by obligations and benefits through an unwritten contract of the mutual meeting of needs. Friendship, in contrast, is not for anything except the friend, and therefore as a nonutilitarian relationship, friendship takes us to the center of Christian living. The history of a person’s spiritual pilgrimage can usually be traced from the history of that person’s friendships.

We are called to care about one another – and to show it. The answer to the one of the oldest questions “am I my brother’s keeper?” is yes. Being a brother’s keeper may at times mean intervening with tough love when it would be easier to let thing slide. A true friend however steps in. Paul did this (Galatians 2:11); Jethro did it (Exodus 18:13-26).

May we seek to be true friends to one another, speaking up even if it might at first cause a little pain to both parties involved.