What Friendship Does to Us

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

  “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves 

 “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
― C.S. Lewis

I have a long history of friends.  And I am very slowly coming to understand what sort of friend I am, what sort of friendship my spirit craves.  From the beginning of time God has declared to us, "It is not good for man to be alone," and because we are made in His image--the three-in-one, perfect-fellowship God--we are never whole while we hold ourselves back from loving and being loved.

I tend to think of my life as laid out around groups of friends: my St. Al's friends, my high school friends, my Mansfield friends, my Paul Smith's friends, my Beaver Camp friends, my current friends, with whom I'm doing life and raising my family.  And for the most part, each group is distinct from the others, and so I organize and interpret my life and growth by them.  But every now and then--actually, way more often than I'd expect--members of different groups mingle and know each other and cross boundaries and connect my circles.  Such delightful connections happen most frequently among friends who are part of the family of God, and I recognize what C. S. Lewis spoke of:  “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”

It occurs to me that as social beings, we must commemorate significant changes, the beginnings and endings of any season.  When the ceremony, so to speak, does not happen, we feel the lack of closure very deeply, and seem to never quite have peace about the change.

For example, when I was in middle school my great-grandmother died.  And do you know what stuck with me most about her passing?  It was sometime after Christmas, and my mother had nagged me over and over again to send Granny Bill a thank you note for her gift to me.  And I never did.  And then she was dead, and I never could.  It doesn't seem like a big thing, but I knew that I had failed to show her honor when it was in my power to do so, and it sat heavy on my conscience for a long time.

When we celebrate our personal beginnings and endings, we acknowledge that our lives are significant.  When we celebrate the milestones of others, we acknowledge that their lives are significant, and that who they are matters to us.

For summer staff, Beaver Camp is a microcosm of Life: for two months, we do life together in very intense ways.   We all set our watches to the Camp Clock, we dine together, sleep together under the stars and in crowded cabins, shower and poop together.  We train together, brainstorm together, fail and succeed together.   We pray together, study together, laugh and cry together.  We build each other up.  We wear each other down.  We come alongside each other and lay aside our differences for the common goal of transformed lives; we think we're there to transform the lives of campers, but almost without realizing it, we are transformed ourselves.  The Lord does a mighty work, because we have determined that what matters most is Love, and we watch Him pour it out for us in remarkable ways.

And we mark the milestones throughout the summer.  We have a welcome and introduction to kick off training.  We have a test and then a commissioning service to end training and begin Summer.  For the next seven weeks, we have ceremonies, for campers and for staff, to mark the beginnings and the ends, and we have ceremonies to celebrate what happens in the middle.

It is so intense.  It is exhausting.  It is WONDERFUL.  And around week 4, everybody secretly begins dreading the End.  For a couple of weeks, it looms in the future as something we don't really want to face.  Then we realize we're tired, and begin to look forward to the comparative rest of college life and other pursuits.  And suddenly, the End arrives, and we're almost surprised.

Sticky Church: we are like legos, with a finite number of friend connectors.  When a dear friend moves away, it frees a peg to connect with someone else with whom you could share a beautiful friendship.