Steve West: True friendship

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, October 25th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s said that true friendship is seen through the heart and not through the eyes. Here’s WORLD commentator Steve West.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: When I arrived at the restaurant for lunch today, Lena waved me to the left, where my friend was waiting, standing to honor me, a rare thing for a man to do for a man today. We have been meeting this way weekly for over 35 years. That’s just over 1800 lunches, and allowing $10 per lunch, that’s over $18,000 I’ve spent on lunch with him. He’s worth it. Not every man has a friend like this.

We fall easily into conversation, moving from family to work to faith. The salad and pizza are good but only a backdrop for mutual encouragement, laughter, and, on occasion, an easy silence, the interstices of knowing nothing needs to be said.

I don’t remember how our rapport came about, other than by circumstance and practice, by deliberateness and death–death to self, that is. To have a true friend you have to give up rights at some point and accept the privilege of being inconvenienced, of sharing burdens, of listening to someone’s voice other than your own. True friendship is God’s editor, chipping away at my old self and cheering on the new.

C.S. Lewis said that “[i]n friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The 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.”

I accept the bill this time, and he will do so next time. Yet we do not keep track. We owe each other nothing but the debt of love. We walk to his car and he sits there while I lean in and we pray, mostly in his easy and honest eloquence, a brother with a brother. Whether on sidewalks, in cars, or walking away, we always pray, a period to our time, a paragraph in a story not finished.

Good friendships, like Lewis speaks of, are providential, a mystery of sovereignty and free choice. Wilbur Wright, one of the Wright brothers, once humorously hinted at this interplay. Wright said, “If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.” But of course you don’t choose those things, and yet, there is a way that you do, by taking hold of what circumstance brings you, by digging in and sinking roots–even in the soil of friendship, a long conversation in one place.

I’m Steve West.

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