By Drew Williams
Sentinel Contributor
My start to 2016 was not quite what I was expecting. At the end of 2015, I had some surgery that was heralded as the closing chapter in a volume of health issues that have harassed me for the past three years. In many regards, the surgery was successful—except that it wasn’t, and having firmly believed that the finishing line tape was just before me, I discovered that I have another lap to run.
So at the moment, I very much feel like I am in dry dock (to use a third metaphor). I won’t pretend this is a happy place for me. Nonetheless, despite all my moaning and irritability, I must admit this season is proving to be formative. And one of the unexpected treasures in this season has been a renewed appreciation for the gift of friendship.
To the ancients, friendship was understood as the fullest of all loves. Contemporary culture—at least in so far as it is evidenced in film or literature—most often references friendship as some kind of “filler” until the love of your life is spotted across a crowded room. I wonder if it took my being sick to truly see the fullness of the gift of friendship and how essential it is.
Just to begin with, I am so frustrated with the ongoing saga of my health. From my vantage point, it feels more like some tedious, third-rate soap opera that just keeps on running. I bore myself with my health! Believe me, if I could depart my own company, I would. And yet, I have been on the receiving end of friendship that is dogged, tenacious, patient, forbearing, long suffering and asks nothing in return.
C.S Lewis, who writes with great insight on the subject of friendship in The Four Loves, suggests, “The mark of perfect friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (which it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.”
I had a recent hospital visit that left me with an interesting observation. I was in a mobile bed lined up in a corridor, awaiting a series of diagnostic procedures. Every few minutes, the line of beds was moved further up the corridor until it was my turn to be seen by the doctor. A little like a Fun-Park (or amusement park) but without the park or the fun. Mounted on the wall was one of those curved mirrors that make objects appear smaller and farther away and I found myself peering up at it, not to see how I was looking but to see how far up the line I was and therefore how close to the next procedure. My difficulty was that I could not make out which bed I was in. We were all in identical gowns, covered with identical hospital blankets and lying in identical beds. It was as if I were invisible.
It was only the presence of two close friends standing by my bed that made me visible in the mirror. They stepped away—I disappeared. They stepped back—I could see who I was and where I was headed. It occurred to me that friendship itself has this extraordinary power to make us visible; and not just visible but to see ourselves with more clarity. George Herbert wrote, “The best mirror is an old friend.”
Friendship, with its intrinsic capacity to see from the outside, also carries an unexpected but most welcome dividend: humor. It is a remarkable facet of friendship that in the darkest, bleakest, most undignified moments, a friend is distinguished as one who has the widest permission to introduce a little humor.
Certainly we weep with those who weep, but there is “…a time to weep, and a time to laugh…” [Ecclesiastes 3:4]. It takes a true friend to tell the difference and have the courage to deploy some wit; I have been blessed with those who excel in this art! One my favorite get-well notes was attached to a fruit pie. It read, “Drew, you are exactly where you are meant to be. You are incredibly loved… so shut up and eat pie!”
When I first came to faith, a friend told me that the very best friends I would ever have would be the ones that God chose for me. He self-evidenced that wisdom, but the truth of his statement has never left me. Lewis would agree. He wrote, “In friendship … we think we have chosen our peers. But [with God] there are, strictly speaking, no coincidences. Friendship… is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”
Back in the hospital, the man in the next bed was completely alone, curled up in a fetal position with his back to me. He looked like a young boy until they wheeled his bed around and I saw the face of a much older man. I wondered how invisible he felt?
All of this has left me with a deeper understanding of the value of friendship, profound gratitude for how richly I have been blessed and a desire to be a better friend. Lewis writes, “When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His.”
Drew Williams is senior pastor at Trinity Church in Greenwich.
