By Aubrey Hammack

Friends.

  What are they and how do they affect our lives?  I read somewhere that at the end of our lives, we can count on one hand how many real friends we have had.  Personally, I think if at that time we can say we have had one true friend we are lucky. 

Webster’s tells us that a friend is one attached to another by affection or a favored companion. I was reminded of what a friend really is a few weeks back on a Sunday morning at church.

Now what defines a good friend? This will depend on the person. But for myself, it means someone that you can talk to about anything. You can share your ups and downs, dislikes and likes, and changes as we move on in this battle of life. And when we do this sharing, regardless of how wrong or stupid that we might be, our friend still cares for us.

It is also a person you can call when you are up or down. You can call them in a crisis and they are willing to lend at least an ear or perhaps it might require a favor of some type. Whatever the need, you feel you can count on them.

Now, how do they become that type of friend. Certainly, it must be a person that you are interested in and they you. You want to know and hear their stories. If it is so one-sided that you only spend time talking of yourself, then this friendship will burn itself out soon.

I have wondered about what makes a good friend for most of my life I guess. In my working experiences since I entered the work force at age 17, I have seen supposedly good friends come and go. I have deceived myself into thinking some people were better friends than they really were. And when I've recognized that they were not what I thought, I was extremely disappointed. 

I see most all work, church and other groups that we move in and out of so easily as what appears to be superficial friends. These I mean are those that we give lip service to and they to us and we think of them as friends but this is not what I call true friends. We spend small snippets of time with these people and even that time is not quality.

Oh, at work for instance, we talk about sports, politics, weather, our families our jobs and all kinds of other things, but we are not really good friends. I realize that even in these relationships at work, we have certain people that we naturally move towards that we have more in common with and usually these are the ones that we share some degree of intimacy with. But these same people are not usually people that you invite to your house for a meal, or do things with on a regular basis outside of work.

As I look back today over this process, I really don't see a person I would call a good friend in my life that can meet the definition of what I think a good friend should be. I don't know if someone like that really exists.  Maybe my expectations are to high. 

 

My conclusion is that I believe it is hard to maintain friendships over the years. I think there are many reasons including some I have already mentioned but added to those would be lack of things in common such as education, apathy, family differences, becoming disinterested, geograpy, and expectations that you might have over what a friend really is or should be.