The Gift of Friendship

 

A big plus of my two teens going to an elite public school is that they are making friends from a diverse pool of students from around the city, who are all smart and generally good kids. While I try to respect their boundaries, I am genuinely interested in who they socialize with, a little bit to surveil but mostly to celebrate that they have good friends and are enjoying life with them.

When I got to their age, friends became everything. First it was parents, then it was activities, and by high school it was all about my crew. I went to a high school with a graduating class of about 275, big enough for multiple overlapping cliques and small enough that you basically knew everyone. My guys went about 12 deep, and I spent many waking hours outside of school and extra-curriculars with them.

I can now appreciate how lucky I was back then. I am still in touch with more than half of them. And, by the way, more than half of them ended up in some form of ministry for at least part of their adult lives, so they were truly good and righteous and edifying brothers. My mom saw what I could not fully grasp, which is that I ran with a good squad. It’s what I hope for for all my kids, and so far they’re off to a pretty good start.

But while “dad” is a big part of my identity, let’s take a step back from that. “Friend” is a weird thing once you leave settings like high school and college. It’s harder to maintain friendships, make new friends, and enjoy friend time when you get to be my age.

But this is not a lament for the younger innocent days when a weekend seemed to extend forever in time and possibility, so long as you were with your guys. That topic is well trod so I won’t go there. What I’m interested in exploring today is how compartmentalized and fragmented the “friendship” part of my identity is at this stage in my life. Back then, I had my dudes, and sure I had other friends at school and in other places, but if you asked me about “friends” it was about my crew: late nights that stretched into the morning, coming up with stupid ideas to video ourselves doing (thankfully for our careers, none of the footage survived), and pranks that I might get in trouble with the law if I offered more detail.

“Friend” today is far more diffuse, a function both of my station in life and in how we navigate connections in an era of social media. Consider all of these categories (and I’m sure I’m forgetting some), in no particular order:

• My old friends, from high school and college, who I was once super tight with yet no longer see on a regular basis or perhaps hardly at all. But give us five minutes and we fall right back into a level of intimacy that suggests we’ve known each other for decades. Which I guess we have, despite the geographic distance and time gap.
• Friends who you’re closer to on social media than in real life. These are either passing acquaintances who you’ve connected to on social or people you first met via social, where the intensity of engagement on that platform makes up for the fact that you didn’t and don’t interact with them in person. I wouldn’t necessarily characterize these as less shallow, just different, and to me equally enriching.
• Friends who you know only in person and in no other context. The opposite of the previous case, this might be neighbors, or fellow parents you see at your kids’ extra-curricular activities. Weirdly, it’s often the case you are not connected with them on social, may not know what they do for a living, and might not even know their last name.
• Friends I’ve made at and through work or church or other activities like that. Which at some point you cross over from being acquaintance to close colleague to true friend, usually because frequency of meetings leads to letting people into the aspects of your life outside of work, and that’s when you have a real friend.

In that last category, sometimes people are lucky enough that those friends become exceptionally close. After enough heart-to-hearts, you’re graced with the sort of cherished place that was once effortless in your high school and college days. For most of us adults, that blessing is exceedingly rare, especially if you keep a busy schedule or live in a place where there is a lot of turnover (or you yourself are the one moving around).

I have chosen into a crazy schedule that does not afford much time to make friends or cultivate friendships. I enjoy what I get out of all of the categories above. I do hope that there will be a time in the not so distant future when free time is greater and opportunities are ripe for friends, both new and old. I am reminded as I vicariously enjoy my teens’ enjoyment of their friends that friendships are to be invested in and treasured.