The Importance of Friendship

There is an epidemic of loneliness in our culture today, and Kelly Needham says that's something every one of us can do something about. I think a lot of us are walking into those common ground areas, the lobby at church or the baby shower, wherever we happen to be at, and we are waiting for somebody to befriend us. And I think the call that we see in the Bible is to be the friend to others that you wish you had yourself, that Jesus does that in his parable of the Good Samaritan. The guy starts asking, well, who's my neighbor? And Jesus turns around and says, well, what kind of neighbor are you? And so in our friendships, we tend to ask, well, who's my friend? Who's going to be my friend today?

And I think what Jesus challenges us in the Gospels is to go, well, who are you going to be friend today? This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You'll find us online at familylifetoday.com. There is a lot in the Bible about how we are to relate to one another and to have brotherly affection for each other. How do we do that?

How do we cultivate that? We'll talk more about that today with Kelly Needham. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. We're going to talk today about the importance and maybe a little about the danger of friendships. And I was thinking about this when Marianne, when we were raising our kids, I learned at some point in this process that when Marianne had a night where she went out and was with her friends for the evening, I got a newer, better wife and mom back at the end of the evening than if she hadn't had that time.

You know what I'm talking about, right? Absolutely. I think this topic that we're going to hit today is really important and it's necessary, but it's also a little tricky because I think every listener will think, I've had a great experience with friends, but there can also be some negative experiences with friends. And I know for women, I don't know about you guys, but for women, this resonates with our hearts. Like, we want it. We need friendship.

Oh, and I think it resonates for guys. Are you kidding me? That's one of the best gifts I've ever had in my life are my friends. Of course, I'm the perfect friend to them.

You know, that's who I am. We've got Kelly Needham joining us today. Kelly, welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you, Bob, so much for having me.

I'm glad to be here. Kelly is from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And you have to be clear because the Fort Worth people don't like you saying they're from Dallas and you're actually not from Dallas. Where are you? We're south of Dallas in the city called Cedar Hill.

Your husband is a worship pastor at a local church there. Yes. You're a writer and a speaker and you've written a book on friendships called Friend-ish. That's an interesting title for a book. I like the title.

Yeah, where'd that come from? Well, it came from this idea, like you were saying earlier, that we need friendships. They're super important, but not all of our friendships are healthy. There are dangerous versions of friendship that we need to know about and be aware of.

And as Christians, I found most people didn't even have a category for an unhealthy friendship with another Christian. And so the title is trying to communicate there is such a thing as being friend-ish. It's kind of there, but not quite. It's not the real thing.

It might be a counterfeit. And so trying to help create a category for that. The danger issue came up, you were telling us earlier, this came up in kind of an interesting way as you were working with high school and college-age girls?

That's right. Yeah, I was mentoring a few girls in college and one of them called me with some peculiar issues going on in a friendship. And a lot of hard things had happened with her friend. She was really stepping in to care for her friend. And their relationship was becoming really ingrown and having some physical temptations come alongside that. And so they were spending a lot of time cuddling together and then that became more sexual over time. And I remember thinking, I have no idea what's going on here because she didn't even see it as a negative thing right off the bat. It was, this is, something's unhealthy about it, but the friendship is good.

And so I started walking with her and trying to search the Word of God for like, how do I understand what's happening here and walk with this friend of mine? And then over time, that story became more common. More of my friends either came out to me that they had struggled with that. Not that they felt like they were lesbians or homosexual, but that they had had sexual experiences with friends that started from a place of codependency and a really ingrown friendship that they became dependent on and then expressed itself sexually.

That for me made me go, wow, this is a bigger deal than just a one-off situation. Let me make an observation here, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, any of you guys. It seems to me we live in a day where we don't know how to think about close relationships with people without sexualizing that in some way. I think the culture tells us over and over again that if you have strong feelings, if you're drawn to somebody in some emotionally connected way, the right response to that is to sexualize it. And I think this goes to every movie you see these days where as soon as the couple starts to have romantic feelings for one another, the next step for them is to sexualize that in some way. And I say all of that to go, I'm hearing from parents who tell me that their junior and senior high kids are saying, I think I'm probably maybe 70% hetero and maybe 30% gay. And it's because they have a strong connection relationally with somebody, and they think, well, if I'm feeling this way about that person, there must be some sexual component to that. Do you think that's right?

I do agree with that. I mean, you even see it with the community of people who would call themselves gay Christians that they would identify with Christianity, but also say that's true to my identity. That they'll look at Jonathan and David in the Bible and say, well, that was a sexual relationship, whether it was expressed or not. And it was not, but they were really endeared to one another in a way that they weren't to their wives. And I think because of their commitment to the kingdom of God and how unique that was for the two of them in that season of Israel's history to have that.

But we don't have a category for that maybe or understand the story. And so they go, well, look, they're really close to each other. David mourns Jonathan in a way.

He doesn't seem to mourn his wives. They must be gay. So, yeah, I think that happens a lot. And yet you write about that in your book, the David and Jonathan friendship. What is it about that friendship that we can learn from? Because it really is beautiful. It is beautiful. And you can see why some people would say, oh, no, it went beyond beautiful to sexual. And yet I step back and go, no, I don't see that at all, but people say that.

So what is it about it that is a model for us? I think what is so fascinating about their friendship when you read it in context, when you read through all those chapters together, is that Jonathan becomes endeared to David right after he slays Goliath. So you see in that moment, David rises up above all these men who are older than him and has faith that the Israelites should have had, but they didn't. And Jonathan has expressed that faith in previous chapters in our Bible. And so I think he sees a like-mindedness with David and goes, you get it.

You get that God is strong enough and big enough and all of our peers don't get it. And so of course they feel this sense of like, you know, endearness toward each other. But the other factor at play with their friendship is that David is a threat to Jonathan's place, to the throne. And so I think Jonathan's covenanting to David is even a uniting himself with the kingdom of God, even at the expense of his own kingdom, that I'm going to side with David because he's a man after God's own heart as I am, even if it costs me the throne. And that covenant actually enables them to have a friendship.

So I think it has very little to do with fulfilling their own personal desires. In fact, you see them parting from one another for the sake of the kingdom. What is attracting them to one another, what they're loving about one another is this common mission that they're on. And part of the thesis of your book is that for our friendships to be healthy friendships, that needs to be at the core rather than whatever emotional benefits you or I are getting from the relationship, right?

That's right. That's why war stories are actually a really helpful model for us as Christians. In the end of the book, I actually cite Band of Brothers as an example. And I quoted that book that he says comrades are closer than friends. And it's because they share a mission together. And I think Christians have the ability to have deeper and more meaningful friendships with one another than anyone else because we have a mission to live out together.

And that's actually when they deepen. But a lot of us are building friendships because we're lonely. We want to feel comfort, we want to feel secure, and we want somebody to tell us we're amazing. And that's never going to satisfy or deepen our friendships.

It actually can really pull in the opposite direction. It can create more conflict, jealousy, bitterness, anger, resentment. And these things that we now find on the internet, articles about BFF breakups, you know, you have best friends getting together and breaking up.

And why is all that happening? I think because we're letting our friendships be built on our own desires and not on something bigger like they were meant to be. I think when I was in high school, I shied away from friendships because there was exactly what you talked about, Kelly. There was jealousy, there was gossip, there was competition.

And so I kind of stayed away from that. But then when I got into college and I started to be discipled by an older woman and we had this small group of women, it's exactly what you're saying. We were on this mission to make the gospel known. And it changed everything because it wasn't about looking at one another with a microscope. It wasn't seeing their flaws and what you're not doing for me. It became this mission of, how can we reach the world for Christ?

And it became so beautiful, so sweet of that common mission. And yet, we don't always start there because relationships are really tricky. And I know for me as a woman talking to other women, this is such a messy thing. It's this beautiful desire we have, but it can also be really hurtful.

What have you found talking to women? How can we go about this in a healthy way besides having that common mission? How do we get a friend? I think a lot of us are walking into those common ground areas, the lobby at church or the baby shower, wherever we happen to be at. And we are waiting for somebody to befriend us. And I think the call that we see in the Bible is to be the friend to others that you wish you had yourself. That Jesus does that in his parable of the Good Samaritan. The guy starts asking, well, who's my neighbor? And Jesus turns around and says, well, what kind of neighbor are you? And so in our friendships, we tend to ask, well, who's my friend?

Who's going to be my friend today? And I think what Jesus challenges us in the gospels is to go, well, who are you going to be friend today? And I think the richness of our friendships depend on how willing we are to be a friend to somebody else. And the only way that that's possible in my life, and I think for any of us, is to have a really deep reservoir of friendship with God. That if God is meeting our needs, if we are going to him as that fountain of living water, and he's our closest companion, he's our stability and security, we can befriend someone else and risk rejection, risk the person who might not have time for us. And we feel, you know, that insecurity in that moment, if we have a solid foundation with Christ, then we'll be able to navigate that and continue to befriend other people. And that will give us a wealth of friendships that I don't think anything else will. And you open the book talking about your own desire to have a friend when you sort of didn't have any. That's right. Talk about that, I mean, because you're sort of, I mean, we've all been there where I want a friend, but we wait and nobody comes.

And then we are the victims. And we also think, like, they aren't even friendly here. These people aren't even friendly. This church is so annoying.

They're just not even reaching out. Yeah, I think it was the first time that I used to travel with my husband. He's a musician and was on tour a lot. And then I stayed home, I took a job in youth ministry, and he was on the road. And I remember thinking, I'm not going to make it without friends. And I have a lot of friends, but they're all over the country. But I don't have a lot of local friends because we've been traveling.

And how do I build a friend? I literally sent an email to three women that I had met once or twice that I knew. That's a gutsy move.

It was gutsy. It was literally a, will you be my friend email. But I knew them through a fellow mentor. We had met in some common circles.

They were around my age. And I just, I remember writing and saying, look, I need encouragement. I need women who want to study the word with me, who want to pray with me. You might have, you know, too full of a schedule already. That's fine.

But I'm just throwing myself out there. And one of those women, they all respond in some way, but one of them responded and said, let's meet for coffee this week. And we got together that week for coffee and just got to know each other, started to pray for one another. And we met for two years straight every week at that Starbucks. And in that time I had a couple of miscarriages. So did she. We ended up starting a small group of women that were doing some of the similar things you were doing and with your friends and just meeting together to be about the mission of the gospel in our community.

And it was so rich. It was one of the sweetest expressions of friendship that I had had in my life thus far. But I don't think it would have happened without what was really a kind of a scary thing to do, to write to some women I barely knew and say, I don't really have friends.

Will you be my friend? And I think sometimes we have to be willing to do that. Scary because they could write back and say no or say nothing. And all of a sudden you've just put yourself out there in the rejection that can come with that.

And there are some listeners who are going, I tried that and I got the rejection. I'm not trying that again. What do you say to those women? Man, those hurts are ones that new friendships aren't going to heal. And I think sometimes we're looking for that. And I think those are real wounds. The wounds that we have from friends are legitimate and real. And we have to take them to the same place we take all other hurts, which is first to the Lord to heal our hearts.

And if you haven't done that, I think that's for me always the first step. I need to talk honestly with God about this hurt that I'm still carrying around and ask Him to heal it and then provide for me what my friends never can. And as I restore my relationship with God and find healing there, it gives me the courage to keep walking out there and risking that. But it is scary. And I don't think it ever is not scary in some ways.

You have more stories of God's faithfulness the longer that you risk things in faith, but it's still hard. But it's worth it. And we need friends. I think that's a legitimate need that we have. It's not good for man to be alone. And so if we find that we're becoming content or okay with isolation, that's not a good sign. You need people.

I need people. And we have to fight for that need to be met so we can continue to move forward the gospel. And yet I've heard some people say, well, if my relationship with God is intimate and it's really good and close and I'm with Him every day, I don't need anything else. I don't need anybody else. I just need Jesus. Yeah, He's all I need. Yeah, I mean, you've heard that, and yet you just stated God doesn't say that.

He says we need each other. And you even, in the opening story, when you're talking about Abby, that's her name, right? Your friend. You make the comment, it was like God used Abby to remind you that He's there.

Right? So that's the value of the friendship that God actually uses human beings to do that? He does. He meets us through our communion with one another. And I think we do need those times alone with Him, but we are His body. That's why we're called to not forsake meeting together and to pray for one another.

All the one anothers of the scripture you can't do on your own. And that's some of how the Spirit of God encourages and strengthens our hearts is in those ways. We all face temptation, and it's our friends or other people in our lives that are usually the ones to then fight alongside with us for that. Or when we stumble into sin, we're called to confess our sins. Well, who do we confess them to? We should confess them to God, but He says, confess your sins one to another and pray for one another so you might be healed.

So none of that can happen on our own. And I think the gospel is most felt when I share my failings, my sins with another person. And I have to, in some ways, experience the weight of my shame in front of them and then be embraced with the fresh news of the gospel.

Hey, guess what? God still loves you. And that just penetrates my heart in such a deeper way than even just when I'm alone with God. He meets me there in that moment of community. I think that it's so necessary.

We can't do life alone. It is interesting. You know, Bob, I know you've probably heard this as well. In all my years working in the NFL with players, when you talk to them when they're done and ask them, what do you miss about the game?

It's a hundred percent. I've never heard anybody say anything different. I miss the locker room. I miss the guys. They don't talk about touchdowns. They don't talk about Super Bowls.

Of course, in Detroit, we never were near a Super Bowl, but watching it. But I'm not kidding. They only talk about friendship and the bonding and going through two-a-days and training camp together and being on mission together. It is in the soul of a man and woman to connect.

And that's what they miss. And yet I talk to so many wives who would say, my husband doesn't have a friend. He says he has Jesus. He says he has me as his wife.

That's all he needs. And I think these women are thinking, friendship is so important to me. And yet statistically, many men don't have even one friend.

Why is that, guys? Like what happens among men that, is it harder to have male friendship or to find that? I think there are some cultural factors that are at work there. So we can't deny that there are gender stereotypes that are a part of the culture.

So you grow up thinking different things about gender. But I also think that guys form friendships around different things. You talk about guys saying, I miss the locker room. If you were trying to start a men's group at your church and you said, guys, we're just going to get together for coffee and just talk.

Guys are like, I'm not showing up for that, right? But if you said, we're going to get together and start a softball league. Guys will get together and play softball and form friendships in the midst of that activity. Or we're going to go help this, you know, we've got a widow lady in our church.

We're going to go help do yard work for her. Guys will show up for the task and we'll form relationships in the midst of that. I just think we live in a culture today where the opportunities, you know, it used to be you worked side by side in the factory. Or your environment created more natural friendship opportunities. We live in a much more isolated world and culture. Yeah, and it's interesting we're more connected than ever before. And we thought that connection digitally will heal that wound for friendship. And it's actually the opposite in it. That's right.

It's made it worse. Yeah. Yeah, and so when we're talking about friendships, we're not talking about Facebook friends, right?

That's right. What's the difference between a real friend and a Facebook friend? A Facebook friend, you pick and choose what you share with them, when you interact with them.

It's a la carte. It's curated. But a real friend sees you on your bad days because you run into them in the town that you live in, you know, or in the church lobby and they know you and they're like, you're off. What's, you know, what's going on? I think those are the friendships we long for, but they're also a little scarier to create. There's something we like about the safe environment of digital friendships because we don't have to risk anything there.

And so we love it and we hate it. It's providing the secure environment to build friendships where we stay isolated behind the screen. And we love that, but we're not actually getting real friendship out of it. And so we're more isolated and lonely. And so these superficial connections, these curated connections that you're talking about, can give us an artificial sense of, oh, I have lots of friends.

Totally. But there's an epidemic of loneliness because all we have is curated, surface-level friendships and not anybody who knows our hurts, our pains, our struggles, what we're going through, right? I think that's why local friendships matter so much. And I encourage a lot of people that you have to make that a priority.

And what was different about my mom's generation when I talked to her is when she went to nursing school, it was like not an option. You don't have cell phones, you don't have a way to stay in touch, and so you say goodbye to these old friends and then you come and build these new friendships because that's what you have. Now we have options.

And so it creates for us a new decision we have to make. I have to make the conscious choice to let go of old friendships because I can't just continually add, I will burn out. I see a lot of young people doing that. I'm going to have a thousand friends that I'm trying to keep up with. I have to make a conscious choice to let go of these friendships here when I move to a new city and give space to build new ones that are actually in my local arena that I'm going to run into and I'm going to see them. And some days I'm going to hate that because I'm going to run into them in the grocery store when I'm feeling really depressed or sorrowful and I kind of like it and I just want to stay there and then my friend's going to see me and I have to deal with it.

It's a grace, but I don't like it all the time. But we need that. That's where I think we long for those types of friendships. But they happen locally for the most part. I don't think that means you can't have friendships that are long distance, but we need local friendships. I think that's why the local church matters too. We need face to face.

We need life on life. That's right. Not just face time to face time, right? That's right, yes.

And you're not going to get it unless you pursue it. That's right. You know, it's easy to sit there and look and wait. And I think in church it happens a lot. They sit there and I'm up there saying, you need community. And I can see them looking at me like, well, nobody's reaching out.

And it's like, no, no, no, go. You do it. Go reach out. I thought of this. When we moved to Detroit, one of the first things I knew I needed was guys in my life. So I knew that.

And I'm going to preach that as a preacher, but I knew I needed that. And so here I am almost 40 years later. Is that how long we've been there? 35 years.

I have those guys. We've raised our kids together and now we're raising our grandkids. I've done their daughter's weddings, you know, all those kind of things. And I'll never forget when Ann's sister, like her best friend, got cancer, mother of four. She's 44 years old and she's gone quickly. The cancer spread very quick and she passed. And these guys were over at my house while Ann was down in Atlanta where her sister lived, often with her, doing life with me.

I can remember playing basketball. Bob, there we are. We're doing something together, but we're talking about what's going on. And then the day of the funeral, I'm going to do the funeral because I'm the family pastor. The back door of this church opens in Atlanta and all these guys and their wives walk in. Never told us they're coming.

They flew down from Detroit. And in that moment, I can see them right now in the back of the church. It's like, that's our community. Those are my friends, our friends. And it was such a beautiful picture of God's here.

Through friends. That's how strong it is to say, you've got to pursue it. And the mountaintops are going to be there, and the valleys, they are a picture. They are the very presence of God in your life. And we started this whole conversation talking about how friendships in our lives can actually bless our marriage. We will have a better marriage and family if we've got healthy friendships outside. Part of the reason for that is because then we're not looking for our spouse to be everything to us. No spouse can be everything to you, and your friends can meet needs in your life and can help minister to you in a way that your spouse can't. So, to have those friendships really takes some of the pressure off of your spouse to be everything in your marriage. And this is why, on a program that's devoted to marriage and family, we're talking about how healthy friendships are going to make your marriage and family better and stronger. I think this is going to be a helpful, important book for a lot of our listeners. This is one you will read not just once.

In fact, this is a great book to read with friends, together. Go to our website. Go to familylifetoday.com and get a copy of Kelly Needham's book, Friendish. You can order it from us online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call to order. Our number is 1-800-358-6329. Again, online, look for the book Friendish when you go to familylifetoday.com, or order by calling 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. You know, our goal here at Family Life is to help all of us think more biblically about whatever it is we're facing in life, whether it's friendships and how they form and how we live those out, to the current moment in which we are living and the issue of the coronavirus. Earlier this week, we had the opportunity to talk with Dr. John Piper about this issue. He has written a new book called Coronavirus and Christ. And we are making the audiobook or the e-book available to any of our listeners absolutely free. You can go to our website and download your choice of the audiobook or the e-book of Coronavirus and Christ by Dr. John Piper. And again, this is a part of our desire to help you and your family be thinking Christianly about what we believe and how we live during moments like this.

The download is free. Go to our website, familylifetoday.com. The book is called Coronavirus and Christ. If you'd like a print copy of the book, those are going to be available in about a week.

You can pre-order the book from us on our website at familylifetoday.com. And we hope you'll take advantage of this offer and hope you'll read it maybe together as a family or as a couple so that we can all be thinking rightly about what it is we're dealing with right now. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow.

Kelly Needham is going to be back. We're going to continue talking about friendships and how we can live those out biblically. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.