A Friend is a Gift
“Words cannot express such joys as a friend imparts.”
Imagine, if you can, a moment in time when you were sitting on a porch swing or a roof top, or beneath the branches of a shady tree. Maybe autumn had laid a crackling carpet of leaves beneath your feet. Or maybe it was a blazing summer day and you were parched for a swig of anything to quench your thirst. Winter may have deposited its first blanket of snow on the ground and you were hunkered down inside your fort, battle-weary and droopy-eyed after the season’s first snowball fight. Spring may have beckoned you to the garden, and you were down on your knees, toiling in the hot sun, planting seeds to ensure the harvest. Wherever you were, whatever the time of year, nothing else in the world seemed to matter because you were not alone. A friend was at your side. And the moment was perfect.
A friend is a gift. Whether those words have ever rolled off your tongue or drifted through your head in a quiet moment of deep reflection, the truth is undeniable. Friendship is a gift of enormous value. Providing intimacy, rapport, trust, and affection, friendship is the common ground where kindred spirits find communion. “Words cannot express such joy as a friend imparts,” noted St. John Chrysostom, one of the Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. “For it would be better for us that the sun were extinguished than we should be without our friends.”
The sunlight of friendship is cast by design. After all, friends don’t come included in the “package deal” of our birth or bloodlines. Unlike the families into which we are born, friendships are decided. “Our relatives are ours by chance,” wrote the French poet Jacques Delille, “but we choose our friends.”
The rewards of choosing well can be tremendous. As anyone who has ever had a close friend knows, friends lessen our sorrows and broaden our smiles, allowing us to feel accepted and understood when the world turns its back on us. Like the proverbial “bridge” that spans “troubled waters,” friends lay themselves down and also carry us through the dark nights of the soul. They do this, in the words of William Penn, by “unbosoming freely, advising justly, assisting readily, adventuring boldly, taking all patiently, defending courageously-and continuing a friend unchanged.”
True friends are also the cheerleaders who can provide the wind pushing up beneath our wings, that can lift us out of our doldrums and up to higher ground. When adversaries conspire against us, our friends can be counted on to mount a ready defense. To friends we can entrust our innermost selves, knowing they will safeguard our secrets and advise with gentle candor. Listening to our tribulations, they understand even what we do not say. Loyal, dependable, and kind, friends go out on a limb where the sweetest delights are found.
“Some people go to priests,” wrote the novelist Virginia Woolf. “And some people go to poetry. But I go to my friends.” Nobody had to tell Ms. Woolf what was obviously quite apparent-that a friend is a gift.
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