Friendship.

This is a tribute to all those that God has given to me as friends, but it is especially in honor of my friend Tiffany, whose birthday it was when I started typing this tonight...

This year has been a crash course in friendships, how very precious, very rare and very fragile they are. A few mouths ago I was reading the Four Loves by CS Lewis and I was struck by his description of friendship... read it, it's really good. The value that he placed on friendship coincided with what I have come to recently. He said that "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one!' " and that they will continue only as long as they have something in common, be it as trivial as stamp collecting or as serious as faith or as simple as shared memories "True friends... face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.” Another interesting quote is this: "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival". I feel that I am not doing justice to it... like I said, read it.

I regularly come up with a new best description of what differentiates a friend of the sort that you enjoy being with and the sort that is like family, the ones that you would die for. I can however, only remember three of them. They must have been really profound... Here are the first two:

A true friend is someone that you have spent untold hours laughing with and at least a few hours crying with (and over)
A true friend is someone that you have spent more time that you can count praying for.

I came across these quotes on friendship and thought that they where just too good to be left out
“Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget.”

A good friend is cheaper than therapy.

A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us to be what we should.

I thank God often (but not often enough) for those that he has placed in my life as my friends. God has used my friends challenge me and cause me to think, to work with me, to laugh with me, and sometimes just to have someone to cry with. Overall, I think that a real, true, friend is one who either because of what they say or just who they are cause you to look up and seek the face of your Father. A real friend is someone who helps to make you more holy.