This is a conference talk given by Andy Murray at a Christian befriending conference on 23rd September 2023 organised by Edinburgh City Mission and Bethany Christian Trust at Craiglockhart Parish Church, Edinburgh. Andy Murray is the Programme Director for Safe Families in Scotland. Safe Families seek to bring hope and belonging to families who are isolated and struggling.
In the film ‘Castaway’ which hit our screens in 2000 we see a real-life example of what chronic long-term loneliness can do to one person.
Chuck Noland played by Tom Hanks is washed up on a desert island with 100’s of FedEx parcels.
His only friend is a volleyball called Wilson and the only hope he clings to for 4 years is delivering a FedEx parcel with angel’s wings on it.
During the film we see how devastating the effects of isolation are.
There is that famous line when Tom Hanks makes a raft and starts his bid for freedom with Wilson and says ‘Don't worry Wilson, I'll do all the paddling. You just hang on.’
Chuck Noland had to invent a person to avoid complete madness.
Recently I was up in Peterhead and I took the opportunity to visit the prison museum.
It is haunting walking around the halls where the famous riot took place in 1987.
What is even more eery is the isolation block and in particular one cell where the most problematic prisoners were kept.
It was so isolated that no matter how hard the prisoner banged – not a single sound could be heard from inside the cell, and the prisoner couldn’t hear anything from outside his cell. The prisoner was cut off from every sound, smell and contact with humanity – the ultimate punishment.
As Drew Hunter says, ‘God had made us in such a way that solitude and sanity cannot co-exist for long. We will eventually only keep one or the other.’ Made for Friendship, p 43.
As humans we are made for connection and community.
But the reality is that we live in an increasingly dislocated, alienated and lonely society.
When David Bowie died of liver cancer in January 2016, he had a ‘direct funeral’.
No friends, no family, no fuss. David Bowie was pretty popular so maybe just the odd choice of an eccentric rock star? Maybe not.
As The Sunday Post recently reported, Co-op Funeral Care launched direct cremations in 2018 and over the last 5 years they have seen a 350% rise in demand.
12% of all Co-op funerals in the UK now don’t have anyone there. People are dispatched ‘directly’.
Other funeral directors report that between 15-20% of all cremations are now ‘unattended’ direct cremations.
While no doubt there is an element of cost cutting in the current cost of living crisis, direct unattended funerals are the logical conclusion to our increasingly lonely society.
When Teressa May launched her ‘loneliness strategy’ in October 2018, which included the appointment of Tracey Crouch, Minister for Loneliness, the launch statement said:
‘Three quarters of GPs surveyed have said they are seeing between one and five people a day suffering with loneliness, which is linked to a range of damaging health impacts, like heart disease, strokes and Alzheimer’s disease. Around 200,000 older people have not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month.’
In the wake of the COVID epidemic, another epidemic has gripped our Western World – loneliness - what Mother Teressa called ‘the leprosy of the West.’
During COVID-19 the proportion of people saying they ‘often or always feel lonely’ increased from 1 in 20 to 1 in 14 (The Best of Friends, Phil Knox, p 19).
1. Defining Friendship
So, what is friendship and why do we all long for better, richer and deeper friendships?
Friendship is the sharing of joy or sorrow with people we love and trust.
Drew Hunter in ‘Made for Friendship’ defines friendship in this way:
‘Friendship is an affectionate bond forged between two people as they journey through life with openness and trust.’
Brian Croft in his book ‘Pastoral Friendship’ defines friendship as ‘an intimate relationship of love, trust and loyalty.’
As Christians we believe that we are inescapably communal. Friendship isn’t a luxury it is a necessity.
As the 19th century Anglican JC Ryle says:
‘This world is full of sorrow because it is full of sin. It is a dark place. It is a lonely place. It is a disappointing place. The brightest sunbeam in it is a friend. Friendships halves our troubles and doubles our joys.’
Proverbs 18 v 1 says, ‘whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgement.’
Wisdom is not to be found in contemplative isolation (although there is a time and a place for that) the wise man, according to the Bible, grows and develops rich friendships.
In 2009, Bronnie Ware wrote an online article called ‘Regrets of the Dying’ which were her reflections of nursing terminally ill patients as a palliative nurse.
The article was viewed by millions of people worldwide and Bronnie went on to write a best-selling book ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying’.
Along with:
• I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
• I wish I had lived a life true to myself, not the life others expect of me.
• I wish I had allowed myself to be happy.
• I wish I had the courage to express my feelings…
Bronnie found that one of the top five dyeing wishes of her patients was that they had stayed in touch with their friends.
We long for friendship and yet, if many of us are honest, we don’t invest a lot of time in cultivating those friendships.
So we’ve seen how important friendship is but where does this yearning for friendship come from?
2. The Edenic Ache
Well as Christians we believe in a God who dwells in perfect, eternal community.
In Genesis we read that God said, ‘let us make man’.
Mankind was not made from a solitary cosmic being but a loving Trinity.
Our designer is relational and that is why we have connection in our DNA.
As Drew Hunter says, '…the Trinity shows us that the ultimate reality is not eternal nothingness. It is not eternal matter. It is not an eternal force. Ultimate reality is personal, relational, and exuberantly joyful. Before there was anything, there was love. There was, in a sense, friendship.’
Made for Friendship, p 123.
This triune God created man with an inbuilt ‘with-ness.’
God created everything good and very good. Seven times in Genesis 1 God comments on his handiwork. But even before the fall, even before sin came into the world, God said it was not good for man to be alone.
As Drew Hunter says:
‘Every soul reverberates with the Edenic ache for friendship. It’s an ancient and primal longing. We are inescapably communal.’ Made for Friendship, p 43.
The desire for connection is not the result of sin but the result of a Triune God building friendship and community into our DNA.
As Tim Keller said, ‘Adam was not lonely because he was imperfect, but because he was perfect. The ache for friends is the one ache that is not the result of sin…This is one ache that is part of his perfection…God made us in such a way that we cannot enjoy paradise without friends.’ Sermon on Spiritual Friendship in Redeemer Presbyterian Church, March 1, 1998.
We live in a fractured, alienated, and lonely society. But we trust in a Triune God who has created us for connection and community.
Into this broken and sinful world came the Lord Jesus Christ with the mission to reconcile us back to God so like Abraham and Enoch we could be called the friends of God.
The night before his crucifixion Jesus said, ‘No longer do I call you servants…I have called you friends.’ John 15 v 15. Jesus came to lay down his life for His people so that we could become His friend and grasp what true friendship really is.
Christ said ‘Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.’ John 15 v 13.
Christianity is a faith that celebrates friendship. History tells the drama of friendship created, lost, and then restored in Christ.
As Tim Keller says, ‘the entire history of redemption – in a sense – is a giant act of friendship.’
3. Barriers to Friendship
Before we go in to look at the marks of friendship – what aspects of modern life have compounded our capacity to build deep and lasting friendships?
a) Busyness
When was the last time we sent a letter or wrote a card?
When was the last time we befriended someone, visited someone who lives alone?
When was the last time we visited our wider family?
We are too busy.
Over 1 billion people and 42% of the entire workforce of Britain are now knowledge workers where they use their brain to work.
This work has no start and end – often people are logging on to meetings with colleagues in America or the Far East at all hours of the day and night.
Work can reach us anywhere, at any time. There is no rest – we are never ‘not at work’.
Busyness crowds out deep connection and friendships.
Friendships are not developed in a vacuum – they need time.
As Phil Knox says, ‘Time is the oxygen of friendship. Spend enough time in someone’s presence, with no agenda and enough conversation, and the magic of relationship begins to take effect.’ The Best of Friends, p 22.
b) Technology
Email, texting and social media have literally transformed how we interact.
They can often complement our relationships.
But unfortunately, as Drew Hunter say ‘we often trade deep communion for digital communication’.
Stephen Marche in his 2012 article ‘Is Facebook Making Us Lonely’ says:
‘We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead, we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.’
Technology
· depersonalises communication,
· disengages us from real relationships,
· disembodies real conversation.
· creates dependence on impersonal ways of addressing difficult issues.
Netflix now acknowledges that its greatest rival is not another streaming service – its greatest rival is sleep (quoted in Best of Friends, Phil Knox, p 26).
Social media has allowed us to have more connections but fewer real friendships.
As Drew Hunter says:
‘Friendship should be more like a submarine, holding few and going deep. But we’ve made it more like a cruise ship, filled with lots of nice people whom we don’t know well at all.’ Made for Friendship p 26.
c) Mobility
My grandparents stayed on the same croft just outside Dornoch for their whole lives.
They knew everyone in their community, relatives lived nearby, and their roots were deep in that community. They were committed to the local Free Church in a way that is almost unrecognisable to us today.
Relationships take time, they need deep soil. But we live in a transient society.
Mobility can stop us from putting down deep roots and investing in lasting relationships.
Interestingly greater mobility influences whether people volunteer or not.
As Jon Yates says, ‘People who plan to leave somewhere in the next 5 years are 20-25% less likely to get involved in voluntary activities, attend religious activities, join a club. Transience changes too the behaviour of those who stay put. They too are less likely to get involved in voluntary activities.’
Jon Yates, quoted in Best of Friends, Phil Knox, p 24.
4. So how does the Bible define friendship?
I don’t know what your best memory of friendship is.
For me, it was weekends spent in a place called Kylerhea, Skye with 2-3 friends.
The old glass coffee pot bubbled away on the old stove, we played chess for hours and rowed the boat across to Glenelg.
When I think back, I feel a warmth, a comfort and a safety.
In his book The Four Loves – C.S. Lewis called these moments an ‘Affection’.
‘Those are the golden sessions…when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk…at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life – natural life – has no better gift to give.’
So, what are the marks of great friendship?
a) Affection
A friend is someone who holds us in high esteem – one who loves us.
This affection is often displayed by our presence.
When Jonathan went to David at Horeh in the wilderness of Ziph, David must have been at one of the lowest points in his life.
Jonathan didn’t send a messenger, he didn’t send a letter, he showed up (1 Sam 23 v 15-18).
It says, ‘he helped him to find strength in God.’
Sometimes we are crushed, sometimes we are overwhelmed and we just need somebody else to show up in the darkness and hold a candle for us.
We may not have all the answers, but we underestimate the power of presence.
David and Jonathan give us an example of love and affection.
b) Constancy
The Biblical teaching on friendship is covenantal rather than consumerist.
Friends don’t desert us in our darkest hour.
‘A friend loves at all times and a brother is born for adversity’ Proverbs 17 v 17.
We see this again with David and Jonathan in 1 Sam 20 v 8.
‘Deal kindly with your servant, for you have brought your servant into a covenant of the Lord with you.’
This word ‘deal kindly’ is the Hebrew word for steadfast covenant love.
David and Jonathan were covenant friends bound to each other for life.
We see this level of friendship in the book for Ruth between Ruth and Naomi. It is more than family loyalty it is covenant love.
c) Transparency
Most of us would agree that relationships need honesty but it’s possible to be honest without being open.
Real friends often know us better than we know ourselves.
True friends walk in the light together – there is no deceit or underhandedness.
John says, ‘If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.’ (1 John 1 v 7).
Walking in the light isn’t just about obedience, its about coming out of hiding.
True friends help us to come out of hiding and live in integrity.
When we confess our sins to God and each other, then we find real forgiveness and friendship.
d) Candor or honesty
True friendship involves speaking the truth in love.
As Proverbs 27 v 5-6 remind us; ‘Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.’
If we see a friend who is about to commit and act of foolishness, true friendship requires us to gently and lovingly speak up.
As the Puritan Thomas Goodwin once said;
‘Simplicity and plain heartedness…is the truest and rarest jewel of friendship.’ Thomas Goodwin
e) Empathy
Another mark of true friendship, according to the Bible, is empathy.
Friends weep with those who weep.
We enter into the emotional state of our friend, we sit with them, we walk with them in their brokenness.
Brene Brown says: “Empathy has no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It's simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of 'you're not alone. '”
When my sister was dying in 2018/19, two friends phoned me almost every week.
Often there wasn’t much to say but their call meant a lot to me.
One of them flew up all the way from London just to be at her funeral in October 2019.
d) Trust
Have you ever been betrayed by a friend?
Perhaps you shared something in confidence, and it was betrayed.
The book of Proverbs is full of advice about friendship, but is also has a lot to say about ‘the whisperer.’
‘Whoever covers an offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates friends.’ Prov 17 v 9.
Isn’t this rife in Christian circles?
How much gossip is repackaged as ‘concern’ or ‘for prayer’.
If friendship isn’t built on the sure foundation of trust, we need to fix it quick or move out fast.
At the end
of Castaway, Chuck Noland is picked up by a cargo ship and returns home.
He delivers the
FedEx package with the angel’s wings and leaves a note that the package had
saved his life.
The man who
lived his live solving productivity problems found that life had little
meaning or purpose without love, friendship and connection.
We as
Christians have the opportunity to offer this beautiful gift of friendship to
our lonely, alienated and fractured world.
Friendship
can be costly but Christ has given us the greatest example of what He was
willing to do for his friends.
As Hugh
Black says ‘we have few friendships, because we are not willing to pay the
price of friendship…The secret of friendship is the secret of all spiritual
blessing. The way to get is to give.’ Made for Friendship, p 97.
Recommended Reading.
‘Made for Friendship’, Drew Hunter, Crossway, 2018
‘The Best of Friends’, Phil Knox, IVP, 2023
‘Pastoral Friendship’ Haykin, Croft and Carroll, CFP, 2022
Why don't you think of volunteering with one of these charities who connect with isolated and vulnerable individuals and families?
