Make new friends but keep the old

Friend is one of those words that is thrown around in my vocabulary on a regular basis. But, as with many words in the English language, it seems to have lost its depth sometimes, or maybe it's meaning just changed. We ‘friend’ people we add on our facebook pages. While driving around crazy DC streets I’ll often call the faceless cars around me friend. I generally call people among who I associate friend.

But it is far more than just to push a button to ‘friend’ someone on facebook, say ‘hi’ in the hall, or know of someone else’s existence. And yet these are all part of being a friend. I also love meeting new people. I meet so many new people that I may wonder how is it possible to keep up with all of them? Then there are those friends who I don’t see for years at a time and the next time our paths cross, it’s like music to the soul.


I decided to put some thought into what really is a friend. “Each Life That Touches Ours for Good” is a great hymn whose title suggests one definition. Interestingly, a friend is not the people who one loves. I like to make comparisons. If the opposite of a friend is an enemy, that means, according to our first definition, an enemy would be someone who touches our lives for bad. Jesus taught us to love our enemies, which implies to me that a friend isn’t defined by our love for them. In the same verse, He uses some parallism teaching techniques that give us more definitions of an enemy:

God’s friends are those who support Him and do good to Him are those who keep the commandments: John 15:14 "Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command of you."

Matthew 5:44 , Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

A friend then is someone who praises you, loves you, doesn't take advantage of you or your weaknesses and doesn't persecute you.

My favorite quote I ever heard on friendship was from George Elliott:

“Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping , and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” George Elliot