Who's your best friend?

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         “One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24).
 
         The expression “unreliable friends” is what grammarians call an oxymoron – “a figure of speech that produces an incongruous seemingly self-contradictory effect.” In the long run there is no such a thing as an unreliable friend. There may be those who seem to be friends but in a moment of decision demonstrate that they are not reliable after all. The NLT reflects this by putting the term “friends” in quotes. By way of contrast, a true friend is one that “sticks closer than a brother.” This relationship cannot be broken by the circumstances of life. Some of you will know of Henri Nouwen, the Dutch professor and theologian who after years of teaching in some of best universities in America left the academic world to work with mentally and physically handicapped people. What he wrote on the subject of friendship in Three Meditations on the Christian Life gets right at the heart of the matter.

            “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

         The essence of Nouwen’s portrayal of friendship is the oneness that exists between genuine friends. Whatever the situation in life, the friend is there with you. Friends may not understand any better than you the why of your joy or despair, but they experience it along with you. Perhaps one can say that true friendship is a unity that life with all its trials and adversities cannot nullify. For the Christian believer Jesus Christ is the ultimate friend, the one who understands our life’s dilemmas and is here with us no matter what. We can share every detail with him with the assurance that his response will not be a cheap correction but a willingness to go through the difficulty with us, lovingly clarifying the issue and encouraging us as we struggle.

         When I was a boy in an evangelical church we used to sing “What a friend we have in Jesus.” At that time I was far more interested in the rhythm than the words. Now that a considerable number of years have gone by, I’m finding out that in fact I have no closer friend. We are spending more time together and enjoying one another more than ever. Although Solomon was not talking in New Testament terms I am sure he would agree that Jesus is the perfect example of a friend “who sticks closer than brother.”