Cultivate Friendships!

We are made for friendship, and nothing nourishes happiness like having friends. So cultivate friendships. How do you make friends? You do this by being a friend. A friend is someone who appreciates you for who are you, not for what you do. 

Start small; find someone who needs a friend and become that person’s friend. Appreciate him or her for who he or she is, not for what he or she does or doesn’t do, especially for you.

          The Book of Sirach says: “Faithful friends are a sturdy shelter; / whoever finds one has found a treasure. / Faithful friends are beyond price;/ no amount can balance their worth./ Faithful friends are life-saving medicine;/ and those who fear the LORD will find them” (6:14-16).

          Of course, if you find someone who needs a friend, it’s possible that person will be someone who has difficulty attracting friends. But once you become a person’s friend that person becomes more attractive as a potential friend for others, as well.

          Lord George Gordon Byron, the early nineteenth-century English poet, was born with a “clubfoot”, which medical science could do nothing about in those days. While Byron and his friend Robert Peel were schoolmates, one day Byron saw Peel being beaten unmercifully by a senior boy. It was hopeless for Byron to think of fighting because of his crippled foot. 

All the same, he approached the bully and bravely inquired how many times he was planning on striking his friend. “what’s that to you?” the bully roared. “Because, if you please,”  Byron replied, trembling with rage and fear, “I would take half.”

          A friend is one who would do something like this. A friend is not just someone to pal around with. True friendship means knowing as you are known. Friends know they can be their true selves with one another, no need to “put on an act”.

          Friendship is even more than this, however. The idea is to have friends and no enemies. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, at an official function, referred to the Southerners not as foes to be exterminated, but as erring human beings. An elderly lady, intensely patriotic, rebuked Lincoln for speaking kindly of his enemies when he ought to be thinking of destroying them “why, madam, “Lincoln said, “do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

          Someone old friends are the best friends. But sometimes old friends are also distant friends, and we don’t stay in touch as often as we might. So nourish your happiness by getting in touch more often with old friends. The relatively recent phenomenon of e-mail may revive the dying art of letter writing. Write to some old friends, letting them know how important they are to you.